Taking the Microphone Away From Deniers
TVO Producer Daniel Kitts makes the case in the Globe and Mail online edition for not giving climate change "skeptics" equal time.
But he misses a couple of arguments, at least.
First, if you surveyed all those legitimate scientists who accept or contest the theory of anthropogenic global warming and then quoted them proportionately, the deniers would get to comment, but only very, very rarely. Choosing one person on one side and one on the other - as journalists so often do - makes it appear that the scientific community is evenly divided, that there is a hot debate. As Naomi Oreskes demonstrated in Science , no such debate exists in serious scientific literature.
Second, if you declined to use spokespeople whose income you could trace back to a fossil fuel company - or a think tank sponsored by a fossil fuel company - you would, again, seriously weed out the number of spokespeople available to challenge the science.
The question is not whether we should accept a show of hands among scientists and then bannish those who advocate a minority view. The question is why we are allowing an agenda-driven minority so much influence in a crucial global debate.
Checking their sources
tricky one
Eyeballing his work, this Roger Pielke Jr. guy is in the Bjorn Lomborg school of thought. To be fair to a journalist, he looks serious at first glance, although journalists have to ask themselves why they are picking him, rather than making their own selection out of the wide field of real climate scientists who are willing to talk.
His speciality is “science policy”, not the science. He thinks politics is a good thing, and since the politics is skewed towards denialism, he feels okay with siding with them.
His last peer reviewed paper is in “Environmental Science & Policy” is just an op-ed piece about how the IPCC isn’t giving enough consideration to adaptation rather than mitigation. The problem with adaptation is it’s already been predicted that we are likely adapt with a massive die-off.
Another thing he says is that the IPCC gets misinterpreted, with everyone cherry-picking the most alarming predictions from it. Now he could do some textual media analysis to prove his point, rather than saying so, but he doesn’t.
Who are the two sides?
If the official line is that the “two sides of the story” are one the one side the climate change activists and the scientists that support them, and on the other the “sceptics”, then journalist will continue looking for comment from “both sides”.
But the reality is that the “two sides of the story” are the climate change activists on one side and the “conspiracy theorists” on the other.
If the “conspiracy theorists” were given one tenth of the respect currently afforded to the “sceptics”, the “sceptics” would exclude themselves. Everyone would realize that with “solutions” like those that are being proposed (by Paul Crutzen, by David Keith, by Gregory Benford, by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory) the notion that climate change is a non-problem would die a sudden death.
I have documented this viewpoint here.