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There’s nothing like a good “second-day” story to absolve the average journalist (very average in this case) from any responsibility to support his contentions with, say, a smattering of evidence.

Admittedly, second-day stories are tough in a paper like the Toronto Sun where space is at a premium. You want to update the reader with the news, but you still have to provide enough of the original story to provide context. Unless you’re Lorrie Goldstein, in which case you can short-cut your way to today’s opinion without making any effort to support it with actual factual references.

In his column today on the “Climategate” story of emails stolen from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, Goldstein offers this as a synopsis of what the purloined emails prove:

“Apparently they (the scientists involved) stifled their own doubts about recent global cooling not explained by their computer models, manipulated data, plotted ways to avoid releasing it under freedom of information laws and attacked fellow scientists and scientific journals for publishing even peer-reviewed literature of which they did not approve.”

Did they just?

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Somebody sent me this Toronto Sun piece the other day and I tried to ignore it. Seriously, in two short paragraphs, columnist Lorrie Goldstein dismisses we "global warming fanatics" as unreasonable, indecent, insensible, absurd, disgusting, juvenile, half-baked, self-righteous and mindless propagandists.

He then lays out a careful scientific argument that convincingly refutes the global scientific consensus on climate change … no, I'm kidding. He just goes on being insulting for his entire 600-word budget.

Perhaps we should take heart that the opposition has been reduced to this ….

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A despairing reader of the Toronto Sun (is there any other kind?) brought our attention to a column by John Downing, who has stumbled upon Michael Crichton's pseudo-scientific novel State of Fear.

If you're looking for a serious scientific review of Crichton's fiction, follow this link and click on the attachment. For a slightly more light-hearted - but still very credible - view on Crichton's disinformation, check here and follow the link to realclimate.org.