German newspaper Spiegel names WUWT the most prominent climate skeptic blog

Unfortunately, they didn’t get the name quite right. They also label climate science reports as “untrustworthy”. It is nice to see though that WUWT seems to be the polar opposite of “The Guardian” and its impact.

“Prominentester Klimaskeptiker Blog” ==”The most prominent climate skeptic Blog”

(h/t to Kip Hansen)

Pierre Gosselin writes on “No Tricks Zone”:

Spiegel science journalist Axel Bojanowski here writes a harsh but well-deserved analysis of the heated debate now raging in climate science.

One thing that we can gather from his analysis is that consensus is totally absent, and that it is very difficult to trust any report on climate science nowadays. He writes in the sub-headline:

Reports on climate science are hardly trustworthy, analyses show. The reason is biased journalists, hyping politicians and arrogant scientists.”

Bojanowski writes that too often the huge uncertainty in the science rarely ever gets properly mentioned, criticizing for example the UN IPCC 2007 claim that hurricanes were in fact growing in intensity. Today of course know we know this is false as there hasn’t been a single major hurricane strike in the US since. (See EPA report)

Distorted communication

Spiegel’s Bojanowski describes a smoke-and-mirrors environment within climate science and its communication. He writes climate scientists today have a “communication problem“, stemming in large part from “uncertainties and knowledge gaps“. The Spiegel journalist feels “their results all too often remain buried“. Citing a recent SAGE article on climate science communication, Bojanowski tells his readers that the authors of reports often present “results coming from climate science in a troublesome way“.

Bojanowski, a geology major, also examines the main purveyors of public climate science knowledge (from a German perspective), arranging them from the extreme downplayers of the issue, all the way to the extreme alarmists: European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), WattsUpWithThat by Anthony Watts, Klimazwiebel by Hans von Storch, Real Climate, The Guardian, and German ultra-alarmist site Klimaretter.

Opinions aside, if anything can be said of his ranking it is that the alarmists in fact do not represent the often claimed overwhelming majority and that in fact a broad spectrum of different positions on the science truly exists – just as one should if the science is to progress and not morph into some sort of unchallengeable dogma.