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Update in BOLD below

New Scientist, a publication that is generally owed high regard, is apparently trying to weasel out of apologizing to NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt for an egregious misquote by the fallen science journalist Fred Pearce.

Pearce bungled the quote in his coverage of “post normal science” workshop in Lisbon, Portugal - really a denier fest dressed up as a reconciliation attempt. As Pearce reported in his original story, “The meeting was the brainchild of University of Oxford science philosopher Jerry Ravetz, an 81-year-old Greenpeace member who fears Al Gore may have done as much damage to environmentalism as Joseph Stalin did to socialism.”

If you haven’t already got a sense of the organizers’ bias, consider a guest list that includes “heroes of the sceptics such as statistician Steve McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick, plus writers and bloggers such as Steve Mosher, the man who broke the Climategate story, and ‘heretical’ scientists such as Georgia Tech’s Judy Curry and Peter Webster.”

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The magazine New Scientist has devoted a special issue to the “Age of Denial,” including a lot of examples of climate deniers’ efforts to distort and attack climate science.

DeSmogBlog’s own Richard Littlemore has an essay in the issue entitled “Living in denial: How corporations manufacture doubt,” which discusses how polluting industries have followed the tobacco playbook in order to confuse the public about climate change.

Littlemore writes:
“The doubt industry has ballooned in the past two decades. There are now scores of think tanks pushing dubious and confusing policy positions, and dozens of phoney grass-roots organisations created to make those positions appear to have legitimate following.”

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Economists no longer debate the realities of anthropomorphic climate change—that's so 1993!

Instead, they squabble over how much we should be spending today to lessen the sting of the much bigger invoices that will inevitably come due tomorrow, should we insist on carrying on with all this fossil-fuel nonsense.

Note: see our welcome to DeSmog's latest writer James Glave - this is his first post so be gentle!

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Here's a New Scientist editorial pointing out the absurdity of Dr. S Fred Singer and Dennis Avery's recent PR campaign attacking the science of global warming.

It's behind a pay-per-view wall, so I've pulled a few quotes for those who don't have access to the whole article:

We need climate change sceptics. Not because they are right - at least not on the big issue of human culpability in recent warming - but because they ask hard questions that lead to deeper knowledge. What we do not need from them is misrepresentation and cynical trashing of scientists' work."

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While it's impossible to attach a current economic value, Tibet's most important export arguably water. Twenty per cent of the world's population depend for fresh water on one of four great rivers that originate on the Tibetan plateau.

Given that fact, the world should be concerned that, as New Scientist magazine reported this week: "The Tibetan plateau is heating up by 0.3°C each decade, more than twice the worldwide average, according to a new study from the Tibet Meteorological Bureau"

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Japanese scientists have concluded beef production typically contributes more to climate change than cars do. The main source of greenhouse gas emissions is the methane released from an animal's digestive system.