And the domino newscloning effect continues…
UPDATE: At 5:30PM PST, it appears SciAm finally realized they’d been had and pulled it.
Of course earlier today, the Guardian and other publications saw the problem and pulled this story:
AAAS withdraws “impossible” global warming paper
Hours later here’s the story still running on SciAm:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-change-crop-shortfall
h/t to WUWT reader “interglacial”.
This just goes to illustrate how one unchecked story, gets into the top science news publications, with apparently nobody questioning the claims.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Appalling.
What in the world happened to Scientific American? It used to be *the* science publication, with a history stretching back into the 19th century. But then it turned into the science equivalent of People magazine, and now they just rush to print any ol’ flashy-trashy thing they can find. It’s sad, really.
Scientific American has not been a “top science publication” for almost 20 years. Just a propaganda rag posing as a scientific magazine.
But your point is well taken, many news agencies are on such tight time dead lines and the drive to “scoop” the other organizations is so high, that only the most absurd gets filtered out at the editors desk (if they even have someone that performs that function other than in name only).
The hard nosed news editor that would send a reporter back to their desk to do some fact checking on the phone before approving a story seems to becoming a myth seen only in old movies.
Larry
Scientific American doesn’t deserve any readers at all. It’s one thing for a minor error to scrape through without question, but blatant errors are unforgiveable – still, I suppose thats the ‘cut and paste’ mentality of the journos involved, plus of course, half of them don’t even understand the subject matter!
Story still being run in some of Murdoch’s papers in Australia.
I gave up on ‘Scientific” American quite a while ago. Actually not too long after they dropped The Amateur Scientist section.
In addition to the poor quality of the reporting, what’s even more apparent is the clueless commenters. A couple of them pointed out the ridiculous magnitude of the number, but most blithly blather on.
The story was covered, with banner headlines in the UK Metro. (free paper read by masses of commuters) Herewith my letter to the Metro Editor; it will be interesting to see the response.
—-
Will we see banner headlines, equally large, retracting and apologising now that the ridiculous claim on page 17 (Wed 19 Jan) has been “debunked as false and impossible”?
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110119/climate-change-study-110119/
A reminder of the PCC Code that Metro adheres to is included, below, for your easy reference.
Looking forward to the truth being told.
Yours,
Murray Grainger
Accuracy
i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.
ii) A significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and – where appropriate – an apology published. In cases involving the Commission, prominence should be agreed with the PCC in advance.
http://www.pcc.org.uk/cop/practice.html
I guess we just have to refer to them as “Unscientific Uncritical American” from now on.
Sadly, I gave up on SA a LOOOOONNNGGG time ago.
As far as I am concerned, they are so bad that even PopSci and PopMech are better.
Truly a sad sad day.
Supermarket science.
I wonder what their take is on this.
http://tinyurl.com/4s7dkl3
The sad reality is that only a few of these publication’s will print update’s to this story explaining the “error”. I’m sure people are already talking about how, by 2021, climate change will have us shooting each other outside the bakery,with the last man standing getting the last loaf of bread.
so they obviously know – they quote the source, that this study comes from a politically active and one sided eco group, you’d’ think they would challenge the study, not promote it.
SA has sunk to new depths of desperation and stupidity.
2.4deg C warmer within 9 years ….
I wish – here in cold old england it would be nice to be back to the temperatures of the Roman Warm period and even better if they could stretch that bit further to get as high as the Minoan warm period.
As a chap who used to work for me would have said ‘ what are they on – where can I get some’.
The ‘tipping point’ when Scientific American became obviously non-scientific was when they jumped on Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist’ when it came out. Looked more like a lynch mob.
So this latest blunder is perfect for alerting more people to what SA has become, and predictable. They certainly are eager to print anything that fits their agenda.
Don’t you understand the papers still going ahead so they can still run the story.
Even if it has not been through anything like the scientific method.
I’m not surprised that SA is still running the story….
…I am surprised that SA didn’t invent it in the first place
Dr. Osvaldo F. Canziani is former Co-Chair of Working Group II, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the outfit that erroneously predicted Himalayan glacier melt-down by 2035. He is also on the Science Advisory Panel of the World Wildlife Fund, from which the bogus “2035” claim was sourced by IPCC.
The climate science community seems to have much in common with the Augean Stables.
The comments at SA are really funny; the acolytes haven’t yet heard that even St. Gavin said “Oh Please” on this one.
Is anyone keeping score on how many “separate” publications are copying this?
I gave up on Sci-AM a very long time ago. I travel extensively for a living, and couldn’t wait until the new issue came out at the airport bookstore. But after years of suffering through seemingly every single story no matter what it was about having some tie-in to global warming, I couldn’t take it anymore. The straw that finally broke the camels back for me was during the Bush-Kerry election, when Sci-AM did a profile on the environmental bona-fides of both candidates. Each and every single time senator Kerry was mentioned, the title “Senator Kerry” was used. Each and every single time President Bush was mentioned, he was refered to simply as “Bush”. Not to mention that under Kerry the environment would be all rainbows and unicorns, and 4 more years of Bush would make the planet a molten ball, with a few islands of radioactive bubbling vines hanging off the dead trees (exaggeration only slightly)
Which is why I dropped out of the AAAS and am not renewing Scientific American or National Geographic. They have been hijacked by the loons.
The more outrageous the claim the more stupid the Warmistas look.
SA and NG went south (sorry to all you reversed coriolis folks) sometime back in the 1980’s as I recall. Used to read both, but stopped reading SA about 1985 and NG soon afterward.
Dang shame though, I remember SA as a good general science mag (no depth but plenty of breadth) and NG had wonderful photography.
I used to love the magazine. Science has been replaced by unscientific advocates for the latest doomsday cult. They are trashing the name of science and are an embarrassment.