Unfortunately, corrections are seldom front page news – Anthony
NYT and Reporter Revkin Issue ‘Correction’ – Admit ‘Error’ in Front Page Global Warming Article Touted By Gore.
Saturday, May 02, 2009 – By Marc Morano, Climate Depot
Washington, DC – The New York Times has issued a “climate correction” for an “error” for an April 23, 2009 high profile front page global warming article that was touted by former Vice President Al Gore during his Congressional testimony as proof that industry was clouding the science of climate change. [ See: Gore Mouthing-Off About Make-Believe Madoffs ]
But just little more than a week after publishing the front page article, The New York Times and reporter Andrew Revkin have now admitted the article “erred” on key points. Revkin wrote about the now defunct Global Climate Coalition and documents that suggest the group had scientists on board in the 1990’s who claimed “the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.” Revkin’s article came under immediate fire from scientists and others who called into question the central claims and the accuracy of the story.
In a May 2, 2009 post titled “A Climate Correction”, Revkin and the New York Times wrote: “The article cited a ‘backgrounder’ that laid out the coalition’s public stance, published in the early 1990s and distributed widely to lawmakers and journalists. However, the article failed to note a later version of the backgrounder that included language that conformed to the scientific advisory committee’s conclusion. The amended version, which was brought to the attention of The Times by a reader, acknowledged the consensus that greenhouse gases could contribute to warming. What scientists disagreed about, it said, was ‘the rate and magnitude of the ‘enhanced greenhouse effect’ (warming) that will result.'”
The New York Times also posted an “Editors’ Note” on May 2 with the same correction.
In addition, the original Times article now has a May 2 “Editors’ Note” , “describing an error in the news story.”
Australian Paleoclimate researcher Dr. Robert M. “Bob” Carter was the first to dismiss the NYT’s Revkin article as “strange, silly even.”
Carter wrote to Climate Depot on April 23, 2009:
Revkin’s latest article in the New York Times makes for strange reading; silly, even. For though the technical experts may have been advising (for some strange, doubtless self-interested reason) this: “even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted”, I’ll eat my hat if anyone could show that was actually the case at any time since 1990. My guess is that Revkin — like all other promulgators of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) hysteria throughout the media and scientific communities — is starting to really feel the weight of the evidence that shows all too clearly that dangerous AGW is a myth, and is simply thrashing around in any and every direction to try to find a way of continuing to obfuscate the issue until December. #
UK’s Lord Christopher Monckton was even more outraged and accused the New York Times and Revkin of “deliberate misrepresentation” in climate article and of writing a “mendacious article.”
Monckton wrote the following to New York Times Public Editor and Readers’ Representative Clark Hoyt, Esq., on April 28, 2009:
“The New York Times guidelines for staff writers on ‘Journalistic Ethics’ begin by stating the principles that all journalists should respect: impartiality and neutrality; integrity; and avoidance of conflicts of interest. Andrew Revkin’s front-page article on Friday, 24 April, 2009, falsely alleging that a coalition of energy corporations had for many years acted like tobacco corporations, misrepresenting advice from its own scientists about the supposed threat of “global warming”, offends grievously against all of these principles.” To read Monckton’s full note to New York Times see here:
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eric (20:33:34) :
Still no facts, I see.
Carry on.
@John Boy (12:38:00) :
RC responds to Lord Monckton saying he makes up graphs to fit his own ideas about things.
Well that is their area of expertise.
Syl 15:36:15
Well, thanks. You do pretty well yourself there, and have persisted. I had a LOT of fun last year over there and I’ve little doubt that the message I purveyed sank in to some of the readers. They can look back and see how right I was most of the time.
Dave the Denier 16:15:41
I agree that George Monbiot is pretty far out there. You’ve got to remember that Andy Revkin is also a true believer of many years standing, and has deep connections with the alarmist camp. I think Syl’s evaluation of him in her 15:36:15 comment is pretty much right on. He does a lot of the moderating on his blog, and I’m pretty sure he reads all of the comments, and I’m here to tell you that he thinks about them and responds to them in a way that is unusual for true believers of his stripe. He is an honest journalist, still unconvinced that the CO2=AGW paradigm is so terribly exaggerated. I’d also like to repeat my two cents worth that it was MJW who wrote the note to him which caused him to re-evaluate this story. He promised her that he was doing further research and would write another story.
I’d also like to respond to the slander that he hates people. He is very concerned that humans use all the means at their disposal to adapt to a prospective population of 9 billion, but I’ve not really heard him suggest that the best idea is to reduce our population. Many of the commenters on his blog have excellent ideas about the way to get to sustaining a population of 9 billion.
Though most of the alarmists over there are hateful and ignorant people, there were some who were fair debaters and capable of absorbing and evaluating contrary opinion. As I say, I had a good time there, for almost nine months, and it is usually a matter of days, if not hours, before I get tossed off of alarmist blogs.
========================================
Kim was nice enough to mention me above. I’m the “reader” referred to in the NYT correction (I would have preferred “alert reader” ala Dave Berry). I’d posted a comment on Climate Audit about the article, and Kim suggested I send it to the writer, Andrew Revkin, which I did. We exchanged a number of emails on the article. Revkin was polite and seemed genuinely sorry for missing the revision of the backgrounder.
I’m not completely happy with the Editors’ Note. I have several issues with the general content, and a specific factual dispute.
First, the factual dispute. The correction says, “The later version was distributed publicly in 1998, but existed in some form as early as 1995, according to an online archive kept by Greenpeace.” That gives the impression that the GCC made a change to the backgrounder, then withheld it for more than two years. The facts a different. The 1995 date is from a Greenpeace dossier on the GCC, called gcc_about_all.pdf, which contains a copy of the backgrounder with the revised wording. The pages are dated 06 Dec 1995. This is the document I originally mentioned to Revkin. According to the Editors’ Note, this is a draft copy, though I don’t know how that was determined. The 1998 date is from a copy of the backgrounder that I found through the web.archive.org “Way Back Machine” and emailed (as a link) to Revkin. The date of the archived page is 24 Jun 1998. The problem is, 24 Jun 1998 was the first date on which the GCC’s website, http://www.globalclimate.org, was archived by the Way Back Machine. So while there’s no proof the updated backgrounder was distributed before that, there’s also no reason to believe it wasn’t distributed at about the time it was written in 1995.
I set several emails to Revkin arguing that the Editors’ Note gives a false impression of the time-line and suggesting how it might be reworded, but my concerns were dismissed.
My other objections are more general. The Editors’ Note implies that despite the correction, the thrust of the original piece remains unchanged. But without any evidence that the GCC was engaged in misrepresentation, all it really amounts to is a long opinion piece asserting the GCC’s position on greenhouse gas reduction was unreasonable given the evidence.
The article and the Note make hay of the fact that the GCC voted to omit from the primer the section on contrarian arguments. But since the primer was never publicly distributed, why does that matter? The article doesn’t even explain how the edited version of the primer was used.
Even if the primer were publicly distributed, would omitting the section on contrarian arguments really be a scandal? The GCC made no bones — or at least very few — about being a lobbying organization. How many other advocacy organizations are expected to make their opponents’ arguments for them? I haven’t noticed Greenpeace issuing documents pointing to weaknesses in pro-AGW arguments. Advocacy groups aren’t expected to take the even-handed approach expected of scientific journals. Heck, I be satisfied if scientific journals took the even-handed approach expected of scientific journals.
I look at the AGW advocates like Al Gore, Gavin Schmidt, James Hansen, and eric here and what I see in them is one glaring ignoble quality: they want to win their argument by any means necessary even — if it means employing the most unprincipled, petty behaviors human beings have resorted to throughout history: ad hominem attacks, diversions, straw men, and just plain meanness. I used to think highly of these environmetal pseudo religious liberals — I was one. Now I am ashamed to think I ever wanted to belong to this group, which continually display some of the most despicable traits human beings are capable of. Where is their honesty? What happened to their decency? And how is it possible that so many have been duped by so few? What is wrong with us as a people? Does truth count any longer.
Perhaps the death throes at the NYT is a hopeful sign that Lincoln’s wisdom is starting to manifest: You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time. ” Imagine how odd it is that this can be said of a major news organization today. Now, that’s sad.
Kim: He promised her that he was doing further research and would write another story.
Kim, I very much appreciate you giving me credit. I assume at this point that there won’t be a further story beyond the Editors’ Note, though an earlier email from Revkin suggested there might be. (BTW, just for the record, I’m a “him.”)
Now we know how the warmists grid stories so that they become mainstream news and can be fed into public awareness on Global Warming.
1. Gore needs a good reference point for his congressional testimony.
2. NYT provides that reference point with a front page story.
3. Andy Revkin writes the words needed.
4. Gore give his testimony blaming corporate America for ignoring its own scientific advice.
Job done.
However it turns out to be nonsense. Revkin and the NYT were wrong, utterly wrong, correction follows, but Gore was able to walk away from the scene of the crime with his hands clean.
What it reveals is the Andy Revkin is just the news monkey to Al Gore’s organ grinder.
Micky C (MC) (10:33:50) : 2.05.2009
“A beautiful and elegant theory can sometimes end up soiled by the ugly truth of a methodical and well characterised experiment.”
Music to the ears. Climate “science” has a definite shortage of methodical and well-characterised experiments. Their preferred method seems to be to work backwards from a huge model lacking precisely such experiments. It’s amazing how an underestimated factor, especially with a higher power, can completely toss a model because nobody did the calibration work via a well-characterised experiment.
So tune it instead. Or ignore reverse causation. Here’s to more Starbucks.
Has anyone here tried to post a comment on realclimate? I just did – and it was continually rejected as ‘spam’. A note told me to check for dodgy words – which I did, but I had to give up for my sanity. Do they only allow favoured contributors?
I’d like to add a couple of additional comments about the NYT correction which I should have said in the initial comment. First, I don’t think they were intentionally misleading in their description of the backgrounder timeline. In the email I sent giving the Way Back Machine 1998 version of the backgrounder, I described how I got it, but I didn’t go into detail about which webpages were and were not archived. Second, I think I saw it mentioned somewhere that the print version published the correction in the Saturday edition. If that’s true, perhaps that’s why they were unenthusiastic about modifying the Editors’ Note. Though if that was the reason, Revkin didn’t mentioned it to me. Perhaps he assumed I could figure it out for myself.
Revkin didn’t tell me a correction had been added to the story. I noticed it on their website on Friday night, and immediately sent an email comment on what I viewed as a problem. Considering I did the research and provided both of the sources on which the correction was based, I think it would have been considerate for them to let me see it ahead of time; but that would no doubt violate some principle of journalistic integrity.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/09/financial_woes_for_the_new_yor.html
NYT is serious financial difficulties : the above article is worth looking at in terms of how the print media will likely be restructured in the next few years
Despite all the biased climate reporting by the main stream media, the skeptic blogs are doing a fine job.
At iceagenow I have found this e-mail send by a reader addressed to EPA.
The title is strong and says it all.
The weak point however is the writer’s remark about population control because that is the true objective behind the AGW hoax.
We all know that industrialized countries with a high standard of living make the best guarantee for population control.
This is the message:
Declaring CO2 a pollutant is declaring tyranny!
29 Apr 09 – Comments directed to Docket ID No.EPA-HQ-OAR-2009-0171:
Please stop this nonsense of claiming that CO2 is a pollutant. Declaring CO2 a pollutant is declaring tyranny. No human activity would fall outside the reach of the EPA.
Why would anyone concerned with global warming want to regulate CO2 emissions of industrialized societies but not control deforestation and overpopulation? You are falling for a Marxist hoax. Or, worse, you are perpetrating a Marxist hoax.
Ice ages have come and gone long before mankind industrialized. (Visit http://www.iceagenow.com) They will come and go long after your luddite regulations have collapsed the economies of the industrialized world. It is the ultimate hubris to think modern man’s actions could control the weather.
I presume you know the reality of the global warming hoax. I write to beg you not to continue your tyrannical political scheming. You will not succeed in denying Americans’ God-given rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Please give up trying to rule the world.
I suggest that you re-focus on protecting America from real pollutants like the mercury in those nasty “eco-friendly” lightbulbs which save so-o much electricity by reducing incidental heat emissions in cold, dark New England winters. Do you really think everyone’s going to recycle them?
Sincerely yours,
Rebecca Prout
What I don’t understand,is they cry of” industry!/Oil company!!/COAL!!!” “Profits!!” when the “Profit” himself-Algore is making millions or hopes to by carbon trading.
God bless Lord Monckton…
They wonder why the NYT is going out of business.
It’ll be great if the govt. bails em out and takes an ownership percentage.
I regret and reject the implication that I am somehow behind AGW alarmism.
When I wrote the Communist Manifesto, and Capital, I didn’t think about carbon dioxide even once. Don’t you bourgeois capitalists have a heart? I’m still being blamed for Stalin’s crimes, and now you’re saying that I made Al Gore! Nonsense!
Cap-and-trade is entirely consistent with capitalist modes and relations of production, and entirely consistent with capitalism. Go and ask Adam Smith or Thomas Malthus, if they’re still around – capitalists, both of them. Anyway, it’s the proletariat who will suffer from cap-and-trade, not the bourgeois capitalist classes, you can be sure of that.
Karl is absolutely right, cap-and-trade is entirely consistent with my views, and I’m a classical liberal economist. I’m a capitalist, and Al Gore is my buddy.
D. King (14:10:07) and Susan P (20:43:55)
WRT attempts to “frame” the argument with more maleable language, a while back, Lucia noted this brilliant strategy by a “communications” expert.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/dynamics-of-online-polls-weblog-awards/
(Scroll down to Comment 8339 and my following comment)
Add to this the thigh-slapping claim by some true believers that the term “Climate Change” was actually invented by Republican strategist Frank Lunz (Google: “Climate Change” “Frank Lunz”; just don’t have anything in your mouth when you read the results!), and you’ve got some real head-scratchin’ (as well as thigh-slappin’) “framing strategies” to contemplate.
I agree with Kim on this one. Andy Revkin has carved out a unique niche in the GW debate. He works for a bastion of the liberal media and is ostensibly a True Believer. But he does not use the same playbook as Real Climate, DeSmog Blog, and all the other haters. He’ll post on “inconvenient” topics for alarmists. He doesn’t appear to censor, either.
If I’m not mistaken, I believe we have to read between the lines with Andy. He can be turned when the facts will allow him to. Think ahead. You need someone on their side to flip.
For those old enough to remember, think Walter Cronkite turning on the Vietnam war.
It would behoove you all to engage frequently on his blog, especially when he finally posts on feedback and on the PDO. Remember, the alarmists have failed miserably because they do not want to persuade us so much as they want us to submit.
Monckton’s graphs are not reasonable, creating IPCC predictions based on chopping their 100 year trend by a factor of 10.
I sometimes wonder if the scientists, political campaigners and supporters of the case for blaming climate change solely on human activity (sorry but I don’t like pseudo-scientific made up words) are so stupid they are the best argument against their own case. The climate is changing. It is too late for scientists to be blethering about who or what is to blame or Politicians with an eye on future campaign contributions backing decidedly dodgy technologies that are not guaranteed to work but are guaranteed to make some people very rich before they are proved counter productive.
WE NEED TO BE DEALING with real world stuff like food and water supplies.
Certainly the public perception is that of Monckton’s graph. And the scare stories that surrounded the Arctic situation in 2007 and 2008 certainly added to this perception – that is enhanced on many web sites such as realclimate.
However, it seems to be (based on current evidence and not computer models) that alarming climate change is a myth. Just as it seems to be that this year’s Arctic ice extent will not even worry the BBC (although they are unlikely to report on it if it turns out to be a record-build).
I can’t be alone in finding that we seem to want to worry ourselves. I’ve no doubt that ‘Swine Flu’ will turn out to be a mild one that should never have worried the world. Climate change, despite its initial ‘promise’ of doom seems to have been way-overblown. Looking at the graph of global temperatures for the past 20 years I cannot for the life of me see what worries some people. With some predictions of a strong link with the PDO comes forecasts of falling temperatures for the next 20 years. The caveat is that these are yet again – guessed, just as alarming warming was. So far, that ‘warming’ guess has turned out to be incorrect.
The public have been told that the world will fry, and that is why Monckton’s graph will sit very comfortably in the minds of people. The warming-worriers are to blame for that. Whether or not his graph is factual has become irrelevant. The science of this went out of the window when computer models were brought in. We were no longer saying what is happening, but what we think will happen. As I cannot remember anyone 10 years ago telling me that by 2009 the global temperature would have fallen by 0.03 degrees C (that’s what my calculator says) then I conclude that we are in the realms of appealing to the public’s mind, rather that actuality. And many people reading realclimate are to blame.
RIP science.
“RIP science.”
Not at all. The vigorous defence of Scientific Truth by sites like this provide those who wish to make up their own minds with the data to do so.
That a small group of Scientists have sold out to the call of politics and BIG TAX is demeaning to the integrity of science.
But Google caching should enable a witch-hunt of the perpetrators, and having sold their credibility I see little for them beyond ridicule.
Gore, however, needs to be banged up!
Barry, the scientists do not accept that temperature has fallen by .03C
I think (MJW (01:51:59)) comment is worth considering further. One line of debate is exemplified by Kim, which is that Revkin is essentially a decent fellow and allows dissent on the blog. Certainly Kim knows of what s/he speaks receiving more than enough invective from the faithful over there on Dotearth while still being allowed a venue, however this is why we should look at MJW’s comment. Alternatively one could interpret it that Revkin tried to bury the correction on a slow Saturday and not even telling MJW that the correction had been posted. If you examine the timeline of updating Dotearth comments to the correction there has been only one on Sunday by 4:30 pm EST. Of course the MSM typically buries stories this way but has not learned that blogs like WUWT are more active over the weekend when most normal people have time away from their paying jobs. I hope Revkin appreciates Kim’s defense, but more compellingly would be for the NYT initiate reporting on the repeated malfeasance of data releases and poor science so well demonstrated at this site and as first courageously demonstrated by Steve McIntyre over at Climate Audit.
MikeN. Which scientists don’t accept that fall? I worked that out (maybe very slightly out with these new-fangled calculator thingies) using HadCRUt figures for the past 10 years. As Sandy says, any such scientists should be listed.