Writing on his Dot.Earth blog, the New York Times' Andy Revkin passes on a long and insightful quote from the historian Dr. Spencer Weart, to looks back from a dark future to analyse what happened in the early part of the 20th century to bring the world to ruin.

It's well worth the read and is something of a credit to Revkin, who quoted the passage regardless of references like: "... the media coverage represented a new low" and "even in leading newspapers like The New York Times, critics with a long public record for animosity and exaggeration were quoted as experts."

But then for most of his career, Revkin has been a little like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, fallible, but still the a leading voice for reason - at his paper and among most North American newspapers.

Who can you trust, if not your own advisers? That is the inconvenient question raised by NYT reporter Andrew C. Revkin in a newly published article that reveals the extent to which the coal and oil industries ignored the advice of their own scientists on the question of climate change.

The Global Climate Coalition (how's that for an Orwellian name?), an industry-funded group that spent years vehemently contesting any evidence linking anthropogenic activity to climate change, found itself in the uncomfortable position of rejecting its own experts’ recommendations when they reached the inevitable conclusion that the contribution of manmade greenhouse gas emissions to climate change “could not be refuted.”

Check out the New York Times today. 

Science writer Andrew Revkin mentions our 100 Year Letter Project here.

And if that wasn't enough, he also wrote a more in-depth piece on his new Dot Earth blog.  

If you haven't written your entry for the 100 Year Letter Project, please do. In fact, we've decided that the best letters every month will receive a DeSmogBlog swag bag, including the much-coveted DeSmog t-shirt.

We have quite a few already and will start posting them over the next week.