The irony is just too thick, I’ll leave it to WUWT’s readers to pass judgement on this one… Just The Facts
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From ABC News – The Elephant We’re All Inside – Junk Journalism on Climate, or Too Big to Cover? – By Bill Blakemore – Excerpts Follow:
“A number of the world’s professional climate scientists are perplexed by — and in some cases furious with — American news directors.
“Malpractice!” is typical of the charges this reporter has heard highly respected climate experts level — privately, off the record — at my professional colleagues over the past few years.
Complaints include what seems to the scientists a willful omission of overwhelming evidence the new droughts and floods are worsened by man made global warming, and unquestioning repetition, gullible at best, of transparent anti-science propaganda credibly reported to be funded by fossil fuel interests and anti-regulation allies.”
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“Why this decline in persistent coverage?
It seems unlikely to last; all responsibly sourced reports from around the world — “as solid as science ever gets,” say eminent climate scientists — suggest the increasing impacts will soon force news directors to offer more coverage and explanatory reporting to a public that will appreciate getting it.”
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“‘A Crime Against Humanity’
A number of climate scientists have told this reporter they agree with those, including NASA scientist James Hansen, who charge fossil fuel CEOs are thus guilty of a “crime against humanity,” given the calamity that unregulated greenhouse emissions are quickly bringing on.”
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“The Many Findings at Nature’s Edge
In our “Nature’s Edge” reporting at ABC News, begun several years ago with the aim of getting our arms around the daunting climate story by putting it in the context of all sorts of “news from where nature and human nature meet,” we have found some delightful and surprising new avenues opening up.
One of the basic premises of the Nature’s Edge reports, in both video and digital print, is that the global warming story is clearly a story about the question, “What will the humans do?” — and therefore a story about the need to understand human nature better — even overall collective human nature, as a species, so to speak — for upon it may rest any success in dealing well with this immense crisis.”
Read more: Bill Blakemore: The Elephant We’re All Inside – Junk Journalism on Climate, or Too Big to Cover? – ABC News
Why are they afraid to reveal their names?
From the “(a) little knowledge is a dangerous thing” department, what you are witnessing is the utter failure of liberal arts education since John Kennedy exhorted educators to get with the science to catch up to the Russkies, and more recently, the failure of general science education to actually teach any actual science.
Couple the intellectual pablum of the 70s with the ever-present will of the profiteers, and you get this steady stream of useful-idiocy that passes for journalism, education and grass-roots politics, from the (truly) uneducated masses. Making everybody go to school doesn’t a priori produce educated people. It does, however, produce cannon-fodder for the Information Age.
I have to wonder if any of these simple folk like Blakemore ever look at themselves in the mirror and wonder, “am I really this stupid?”
LeftInBrooklyn wrote, “For a while, it looked like exhaling would become attempted murder.”
Actually, I believe I’ve seen figures that normal exhaled human breath has over 3,000 volatile organic chemical components — all poisonous*
– MJM
*in sufficient concentrations of course…
“Why this decline in persistent coverage?
“Coverage” is one thing, but the basic premise of news is that it is … new
““Why this decline in persistent coverage?”
The reality is that we’re living in the come down times of post-Copenhagen euphoria. Whether the majority of people still believe in global warming is debatable, but what’s beyond question, is that they no longer care about it. It’s at the bottom of most people’s priority list, because of economic hard times.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/an-assessment-of-current-alarmist-propaganda/
Pointman
Canman says:
September 10, 2012 at 6:52 am
“I think the biggest problem for CAGW proponents is their unwillingness to debate…”
Really an excellent insight and line-up. Gore vs. Monckton alone would be awesome.
Since becoming interested in the climate wars after Climategate 1.0 in 2009, I have not understood how MSM has so completely missed the opportunity to exploit this debate in order solely to sell more of their product be it magazines, newspapers, or airtime. If “scientists are furious” and skeptics are ready and willing to debate, where is a media impresario to orchestrate the public debate / grudge match? That would sell.
Over time though I have concluded there is no debate in the eyes of the media – just message and since the message is being publicly ignored, the media volume and shrillness are increasing accordingly.
“They” have a well-organized, well-funded public relations machine.
“We” have a few privately-funded bloggers with angry bank managers demanding to know when the oil company bribes are going to start arriving in the bank account.
Guess who’s winning.
Watts Up With That “The worlds most viewed climate website”
Alexa 3 month average; 0.0088% of web traffic.
Yahoo
Alexa 3 month average; 21.290% of web traffic.
Yahoo does not sit on the fence politically. They can’t SEE the fence from where they are at.
It’s both amusing and disturbing that the alarmist with a megaphone that is 2419 times bigger and louder feel that their propaganda just isn’t getting out there.
Mike Mellor says:
September 10, 2012 at 8:49 am
“They” have a well-organized, well-funded public relations machine.
“We” have a few privately-funded bloggers with angry bank managers demanding to know when the oil company bribes are going to start arriving in the bank account.
Guess who’s winning.
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The mind is a terrible thing to waste.
If the “oil company bribes” aren’t there then how do you know there are any?
[@Mike: this is why Anthony asks for a ‘sarc’ tag. ~dbs, mod.]
“When asking computer modelers to identify the biggest unknown they put into their computers when trying to predict how the warming will progress, their answer is simple: What will the humans do?”
So they have everything else figured out except for humans and our incredible impact on the climate?
Bill Blakemore’s eminent climate scientists….drum roll…Michael Mann 7-15-2012 and James Hansen 7-8-2012.
Maybe Blakemore needs to get out a bit more and find some new friends.
I’m still chuckling at that phrase in the title of the post – “The Elephant We’re All Inside”. Recalls that Groucho joke:
“Outside of a dog, a book is Man’s best friend.
Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
Gunga Din says:
September 10, 2012 at 9:14 am
Mike Mellor says:
September 10, 2012 at 8:49 am
“They” have a well-organized, well-funded public relations machine.
“We” have a few privately-funded bloggers with angry bank managers demanding to know when the oil company bribes are going to start arriving in the bank account.
Guess who’s winning.
===============================================================
The mind is a terrible thing to waste.
If the “oil company bribes” aren’t there then how do you know there are any?
[@Mike: this is why Anthony asks for a ‘sarc’ tag. ~dbs, mod.]
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Apologies to Mike. I did miss the sarcasm. I can be a bit dense at times.
Example of MSM IQ level;
Can someone post the Accounts Recievable phone number for Big Oil, I really need to get an invoice paid.
The photo portends an Al Gore appearance?
Re: a “sarc” tag…
I usually use the grin with a wink face: ;>
– MJM
What’s the difference in a fossil fuel CEO, and a fossilized scientist?
The CEO makes fact based decisions.
The fossillized scientist makes it up as he goes along.
Lysenko would be proud of Bill Blakemore. Uncritical repetition of propaganda masquerading as journalism.
“as solid as science ever gets,” say eminent climate scientists These would be the same eminent scientists who hide their data.
Dear Mr. Blakemore
Well this is one decline the alarmists cannot hide.
Eh…no. Mr. Blakemore, you shouldn’t apply speculation about the workings of your own mind to the “deniers” you have been villifying in “eight years [of] covering” them.
Alarmist metaphors are definitely getting worse. You should have stuck with the default “spaceship earth.” I think I know which part of the elephant you are speaking from.
Eh…no. This article is proof enough to demolish that notion.
Hurray! Something I can wholeheatedly agree with but only because your sloppy writing has caused you to be unintentionally ambiguous.
A feint, you mean like your “good cop” denial-it-can-be-healthy-I-do-it-myself routine a few paragraphs before.
You really don’t sound sincere as before that you parroted James Hansen’s charge that “deniers” are committing a “crime against humanity.” And afterwards you continue the ‘climate denial is worse than holocaust denial’ meme.
But I’ve got to hand it to you, Mr. Blakemore you are, if nothing else, exceptionally original. I’ve been following the climate “debate” for some time and, in all the swirling clouds of obfuscatory journalistic ink, I’ve never read anyone cite something, as being relevant to that debate, quite as exceptional as this.
I followed your link where it is revealed that the animal in question is an octopus -specifically a California mudflat octopus.
Of course, why didn’t I see it before. If we just understood that octopuses are just like us then we wouldn’t act so selfishly. What a sucker I’ve been. I don’t have a leg to stand on. I can feel the fossil fuel funded blindfold falling from my eyes. I am no longer “one-dimensional”. I am at one with the universe.
I apologize, Mr. blakemore, if my sarcasm doesn’t rise to the heights of Inky the octopus but in the great do-octopuses-do-sarcasm debate, you can go right ahead and call me a denier.
And perhaps you should have actually listened to the scientist you were interviewing.
You do that Mr. Blakemore. It is an established fact that given enough monkeys and enough typewriters, one of them will eventually write something that makes sense.
Especially when the “psychological barrier” is stupidity.
Yours skeptically
David Ross
The left wing sheep are demanding more propaganda from the corporate media. They are doing exactly what they have been programmed and manipulated to do. The Bilderbergers must be pleased with their results.
NikFromNYC says:
September 10, 2012 at 4:58 am
Nik, sorry you felt subjected to a bout of panic by my stuff. Now you know what I feel like – it can panic me too. Sorry you did not investigate further, you might have better understood just why that box looked like it did.
In brief, Graeff is an engineer, retired from many years of running a successful company manufacturing drying machines amongst other things AFAIK. Straight, very straight. Only, he grew up in war-torn Nazi Germany and saw his home town destroyed all around him by fire-bombing. Out of such life experience came a distrust for all authority. This “Nullius In Verba” meant that when he was retired, he had no qualms about following ancient interest – researching stuff that might appear to contravene the Second Law. He was originally completely surprised by the results he was getting. He has run hundreds of experiments meticulously over ten years, which all bear out each other, eventually. Yes, in time the statement (not the essence) of the Second Law will, it appears from Graeff’s experiments, need to be modified. Precisely because this is such a big claim, Graeff gets little support so funds his research from his own pocket, always thinking about what will work best, help best, provide best engineering quality control, transmit his ideas best. So he makes do with stuff from scrapyards while using extremely sensitive measuring equipment. The appearance totally belies the sharpness of his engineering acumen which applies exactitude where it is needed, and not where it is not needed. I can see Graeff’s genius and I wish others could too, because his work is important.
Note that the number of “climate scientists” making the complaints need only be two. (Or just one if he has the same plural/singular confusion as the ONE) Hansen & Schmidt? Mann & Jones?
As the line from a “Simpsons” episode explains when Lisa asks what percentage of recycled paper was being used: “Zero. Zero’s a percent.”
Frank Davis says: September 10, 2012 at 6:04 am
Ermmm… Where is that elephant putting its trunk?
David Ross says: September 10, 2012 at 11:20 am
“This isn’t the elephant in the room, it’s the elephant we’re all inside of.”
Alarmist metaphors are definitely getting worse. You should have stuck with the default “spaceship earth.” I think I know which part of the elephant you are speaking from.
Yes, here’s the video where the picture at the top of this thread is from:
The message is clear, be careful where you get your news from. Bon appetit… 🙂