This Is What You’d Call “Editorial Bias”

Listen folks, climate change sucks. It sucks to talk about, it sucks to experience it, and it sucks to research it. I would say that it sucks to cause it, but we apparently haven’t learned that lesson yet.

I imagine the world’s climate scientists feel like they are in the back row of a bus, yelling at the drunk bus driver to turn before he drives off of a cliff. Except that the bus driver only speaks Klingon, and all the other passengers on the bus are beating you with baseball bats.

Here’s an example of why:

January 27, 2012: The Wall Street Journal publishes an op-ed letter from sixteen “scientists” saying that global warming and man-made climate change is not a threat that should be addressed, nor should it be brought up by today’s politicians. They essentially call climate science a money-making hustle.

  • They say things like “CO2 is not a pollutant”, which makes me want to put them in a dry-cleaning bag and see if they change their mind.
  • The sixteen are primarily engineers and retired weathermen. So that.

May 2010: A letter signed by 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences defending the assault on climate research is offered to the Wall Street Journal and is rejected. It is later printed in Science, which coincidentally is one of the world’s best journals about science.

  • None of the 255 are weathermen, retired or otherwise.

Climate science and communicating how that relates to how we live is “running backwards and naked through a cornfield” uncomfortable. But when major media outlets exercise this kind of bias, it stacks the deck.

Previously: How to talk to a climate skeptic

152 Notes/ Hide

  1. photosynthesizinghappiness reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
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  3. adhrpr reblogged this from jtotheizzoe and added:
    hate “the press”
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  5. bookwormbreakfast reblogged this from jtotheizzoe and added:
    This is exactly why...other side thinks. Or,...case,...
  6. nokkylicious reblogged this from jtotheizzoe and added:
    is why I hate WSJ.
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    sixteen, (at most) four have published peer-reviewed research...field while (at least) six...
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