New York Times has triggered intolerant deep greens across the USA, by hiring a columnist who is not completely certain we face inevitable eco-doom.
Climate of Complete Certainty
This is Bret Stephens’s first column.
When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God.
But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he’s 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.
— An old Jew of Galicia
In the final stretch of last year’s presidential race, Hillary Clinton and her team thought they were, if not 100 percent right, then very close.
Right on the merits. Confident in their methods. Sure of their chances. When Bill Clinton suggested to his wife’s advisers that, considering Brexit, they might be underestimating the strength of the populist tide, the campaign manager, Robby Mook, had a bulletproof answer: The data run counter to your anecdotes.
That detail comes from “Shattered,” Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s compulsively readable account of Clinton’s 2016 train wreck. Mook belonged to a new breed of political technologists with little time for retail campaigning and limitless faith in the power of models and algorithms to minimize uncertainty and all but predict the future.
…
With me so far? Good. Let’s turn to climate change.
Last October, the Pew Research Center published a survey on the politics of climate change. Among its findings: Just 36 percent of Americans care “a great deal” about the subject. Despite 30 years of efforts by scientists, politicians and activists to raise the alarm, nearly two-thirds of Americans are either indifferent to or only somewhat bothered by the prospect of planetary calamity.
Why? The science is settled. The threat is clear. Isn’t this one instance, at least, where 100 percent of the truth resides on one side of the argument?
Well, not entirely. As Andrew Revkin wrote last year about his storied career as an environmental reporter at The Times, “I saw a widening gap between what scientists had been learning about global warming and what advocates were claiming as they pushed ever harder to pass climate legislation.” The science was generally scrupulous. The boosters who claimed its authority weren’t.
…
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/opinion/climate-of-complete-certainty.html
To a normal person this article might seem harmless enough. But Stephens has trespassed on forbidden territory – he dares to question whether we should accept absolutely every pronouncement of imminent eco-doom at face value.
The overreaction from greens verges on comical. Consider the following from deSmogBlog;
Climate Scientists Cancelling Their New York Times Subscription Over Hiring of Climate Denialist Bret Stephens
By Graham Readfearn • Thursday, April 27, 2017 – 16:59
A New York Times defence of its hiring of a climate science denialist as a leading columnist is pushing high-profile climate scientists to cancel their subscriptions.
Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany, is the latest scientist to write publicly to the New York Times detailing his reasons for cancelling their subscriptions.
The NYT has hired former Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens as a writer and deputy editorial page editor.
Stephens wrote several columns while at the WSJ disparaging climate science and climate scientists, which he has collectively described as a “religion” while claiming rising temeperatures may be natural.
The NYT has been defending its decision publicly, saying that “millions of people” agree with Stephens on climate science and just because their readers don’t like his opinions, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be heard.
But the NYT defence has angered scientists.
…
Huffington Post has also joined the fun;
13 Better Things To Read Than Bret Stephens’ First New York Times Column
The Gray Lady’s newest hire used his debut column to defend his record of climate science denial.
29/04/2017 9:09 AM AEST
Alexander C. Kaufman Business & Environment Reporter, HuffPost
The New York Times took a lot of heat for hiring Bret Stephens, a former opinion writer at The Wall Street Journal, as its newest columnist. There was a lot to criticize. In his storied tenure on some of the most radically conservative pages in print journalism, Stephens accused Arabs of suffering a “disease of the mind,” railed against the Black Lives Matter movement and dismissed the rise of campus rape as an “imaginary enemy.”
But Stephens’ views on climate change ― namely that the jury is still out on whether burning fossil fuels is the chief cause ― drew the widest condemnation. ThinkProgressadmonished the Gray Lady for hiring an “extreme climate denier,” and famed climatologist Michael Mann backed them up in the critique. DeSmog Blog, a site whose tagline reads “clearing the PR pollution that clouds climate science,” reported on a letter from climate scientists who are canceling their subscriptions to the newspaper over its latest hire. In These Times’ headline pointedly asked: “Why the Hell did the New York Times just hire a climate denier?”
Even the Times’ own reporters publicly questioned the hire.
…
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/bret-stephens-nyt_us_5903b95fe4b05c39767fa198
I look forward to Stephen’s second column.
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This article has finally answered a question I have been struggling with for some time. Why don’t editors of newspapers actually intervene with obviously biased articles? Why don’t they at least try to make things more impartial?
The answer is money; papers will usually sell more if they appeal to people’s prejudices. Note above how people cancel subscriptions if they don’t hear what they want to hear. Seems to be a flaw within economic rationalism, the media becomes biased and partisan to sell more papers.
I don’t think the answer is money but a balance of power within the board of editors. One of them may have hold the others to hostage for a considerable time. Does anyone know about changes in the board of NYT?
It’s complicated. In the 1800s the penny papers actually became a less political alternative to the established newspapers. That said, there was a greater diversity of papers and most people could find a paper that aligned with their situation in life.
In the early 1900s, newspapers started consolidating and most cities were finally left with only one paper by the late 1900s. The advertisers, more than the readers, started calling the shots. This left some people completely unrepresented. (But newspapers were practically a license to print money.) link
An example of the above was the situation on the Canadian prairies in the early 1900s. The newspapers in the cities represented business and the farmers had no representation. The result was The Western Producer. It provided farmers with the information they needed to campaign for their own interest.
So, was The Western Producer an example of “a flaw within economic rationalism” or an example of the free market working the way it should?
Back when print media were all there was, each of the larger cities had at least a Republican or Whig paper and a Democrat paper. Then about the time of the Civil War emerged the radical notion of “objective” journalism, but such a thing rarely if ever existed.
Thank God that, at the same time that each city got just one paper and when there were only three TV networks all singing out of the same hymnal, along came first talk radio, then the Internet to bring back the diversity of opinion that existed in the Early Republic.
commieBob:
“So, was The Western Producer an example of “a flaw within economic rationalism” or an example of the free market working the way it should?”
You made a good reply. It is complicated. I guess there is a difference between social representation (Western Producer) and objective information. Alarmists claim they are being objective, NYT claims they are being representative. But is economic rationalism a tool which is able to determine the difference?
I’m not sure, as economic rationalism is the kind of thing that left unchecked also produces chicken battery farms, and human battery farms if given the chance. Without some kind of moral and/or legal framework, it doesn’t seem to care about either the chickens, or the individual, or the ‘truth’.
Chimp April 29, 2017 at 7:47 pm
Not sure Why I can’t respond directly to you.
Your climate science is much better than your history of journalism. In New York when there were three networks we had the New York Times, The NY Post, The Daily News, and The New York Herald. The Daily News and The NYT were morning papers, and the Post and Herald were afternoon/evening papers. The morning papers were much more liberal than the afternoon papers. The NYT had an Early edition (the City Edition) and a later edition (The Late City Edition ).
We also watched Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, who in my opinion were far better and more honest than Walter Cronkite.
Tom Trevor: Like Disqus, the Worpress blog platform indents each level of reply. However, Disqus also marks each response with the stimulator, so after a chain hits the configured indentation limit, it will still link a reply without further indenting it. My guess is that WordPress hasn’t been configured that way here. Mod can tell us if I’m right.
Right you are, ….. thingadonta, …… like the ole Jewish proverb states, ….. “If you can’t get customers in your store ….. then you can’t sell them anything” …… or something to that effect.
And technically, newspapers, news media, magazines, social-media internet sites, etc. ….. are all “sellers” of advertisements ……….. and their AD Rates are based solely on “number of subscribers”.
The obvious solution is to have only one paper, run by the government, since only the government is responsive to the needs of all the people.
/sarc
LOL 🙂
Excellent analogue, Forrest!
May I offer a modification? It’s as if millions of toddlers have soiled their diapers and are throwing tantrums all at once…..
What kind of Galicia; there’s Galicia Poland, Galicia Germany and
https://www.google.at/search?q=galizien+ss
Is anyone aware of any plans by Australia’s ABC to hire a presenter who is not a dedicated member of the Global Warming Cult? No less welcome would be a similar hiring decision by the BBC.
Wont happen, Michael Darby. Their Government managed superannuation is invested in Green. Their retirement will not be pretty when they lose!
The taxpayer, of while I am one, will pick up the tab.
Brett seems to have touched a third rail of lefty thinking: thou shalt not disagree with lefty group think in lefty media. Will he be flashed and burned like a June beetle hitting a bug zapper, or will he survive? (NY) Time will tell. Free speech and controversial thought is vital unless it enrages the reactionary left. Lots of luck, Brett.
Greg Laden emerged to ‘counter’ [his point was bluster] Roger Pielke Jr’s blog post about his sacking. Rare to find to forum one may dispute Laden in.
Great post Eric, thanks.
Much of the Lefty “outrage” is your garden variety virtue signaling. And Mann’s cancelling his subscription because of the NYT’s response to the criticism over Brett’s hiring is a classic example. Here is their response, which was calm and measured: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/public-editor/seeking-more-voices-even-if-some-dont-want-to-hear-them.html?_r=0
It appears those on the Left have either forgotten about the First Amendment, or would like to have it repealed.
The left believes that there is a hate speech exception to the first amendment.
Of course they also define hate speech as anything that makes them mad. Which always works out to anything that they disagree with.
Stephens sounds like Andy Revkin to me, who survived for years at the Times saying pretty much the same things. Dot Earth infuriated alarmists by writing about the uncertainties of climate science, while generally supporting the basic science. This attitude did not upset the higher-ups at the Times, as Revkin generated much discussion, a lot of it from skeptics. He’s also an excellent writer, which helped him a lot.
Revkin vigorously defended his right to be editorially neutral in his moderation of comments, not always the easiest practice considering the constant pressure from alarmist scientists and commenters.
Revkin wouldn’t allow my comment up several years ago when I reminded him of what he said on Blogginghead.TV. He said in that interview that he won’t write about a moderate like Pat Michaels because his arguments take too long to explain.
The rage at anyone who dares have a different opinion, even very slightly different, is quite telling.
I’ve looked all over the alarmists’ sites to find one thing Stephens said in his piece that was so hateful or scientifically incorrect. All I see is ad hominem drivel with no citations or counter argument. “The world is burning” and “fire him yesterday” do not advance the conversation.
Can anyone quote anything in his column that is incorrect or hateful?
“…To stay reliant on fossil fuels would mean tying ourselves to increasingly unstable supplies which could endanger our energy security……”
This ability to invert every logical comment into the exact opposite conclusion is astounding.
Considering the most unstable energy supplies are green energies. Imagine you are close to a solution you have been working on with your computer and suddenly poof….power out. The only solution is local backups at exorbitant costs.
Try maintaining that silicon foundry, in the middle of a batch run, and poof….power out. Processor chips required for improved climate change model biasing just cost more.
See the latest example of what happens when power fails (not related to green energy in this case but it shows the disaster that can result due to an outage) regarding the ice core meltdown at U of A’s new ice core freezer facility.
This problem is so serious that new Green energy facilities require fossil fuel backups of equal generation capacity to maintain reliability in the event of nightfall or calm wind conditions. So energy costs are increased unnecessarily.
So sad.
The solution to buying from unstable parts of the world is drill here, drill now.
Political “Scientist” Michael Mann Prefers Censorship, Slander and Punitive Action Over Debate
The New York Times announced a few weeks ago that it had hired Bret Stephens
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/04/29/political-scientist-michael-mann-prefers-censorship-slander-and-punitive-action-over-debate/
Ann Coulter on This Week this week.
“This isn’t Hate Speech, I’m trying to have a discussion about public policy.”
Anything that is disagreeable with the left is now being labeled “hate speech.” I guess Racist, Sexist, Homophobe, Xenophobe and Deplorable backfired in the last election.
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/04/30/ann-coulter-taxpayers-supporting-leftist-thugs-taken-universities/
To a leftists, hearing something they disagree with makes them mad. So everything they disagree with is hate speech.
Yep, that is the way it is. They are very Orwellian and use these smear tactics to silence the opposition. The willingness and ease at which they will slander people and undermine the 1st Amendment is truly unfortunate. I see them starting the effort of making climate denial hate speech. You see signs claiming Climate Denial is racists, impacts reproductive rights, etc etc etc. They find the thinnest of threads to tie all these leftwing groups together. It is all pure political theater.
So this Michael Mann who canceled his subscription because Stephens’ is a climate denier…….is he the same guy who earlier this month told a congressional panel that he never calls people climate deniers?
The only interesting question now is “How long will the New York Times retain Bret Stephens?” The pressure will be relentless.
The first thing I ever rea about climate change was in the NYT, but it was about the coming Ice Age. This ha me very worried, because my teachers had already told me pollution woul cause an ice age. then, without a hiccup the Times was on to global warming. This switcheroo is why I became a skeptic and decades of study is why I stay a skeptic.
Does this mean that the NYT is admitting that rabid climate alarmism without a smidgen of skepticism might not be the best long-term position?
90% of the media was against Trump before he was elected and 90% are against him now . As one of
60 million deplorables that can’t stomach watching that sector of the media Fox has lots of wide open runway . Maybe the NY Times is looking at their marketing slogan and seeing something doesn’t add up.
Other than places like Berkeley and NY snobs the rest of the country may not agree with everything Trump says or how he says it but they know the Democrats sold out to billionaire bag men and self dealers .
Uh, 90% of the media were for Trump before he won the Republican nomination. He was their wet dream of a foil for Queen Billary. “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men …“
Maybe all the warmists will abandon the NYT, nudging it out of their world and closer to the real world again….
This is just the NYT doing some CYA window dressing…
When the Global Warming hypothesis is officially disconfirmed in about 5~7 years, the NYT will at least have a few articles in 2017 showing some skepticism before CAGW crashes and burns.
The Left owns the CAGW scandal 100%, and when it finally comes crashing down, the Left will fall with it.
The NYT will soon have to fire this poor guy as loony Leftists are going completly insane over Brett’s article expressing some doubt on the efficacy of the CAGW hypothesis…
There are definite cracks developing in the clay feet of Leftists’ god Hubris, and when it tumbles into the sea, it will be spectacular.
They are goin’ down …hard !
Finally, the admission that the policy of exaggeration by climate scientists and their media allies not only failed, but… Backfired ! Enjoy !
–
Read this ; “UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, pleading with scientists to use everyday language to help counter growing public mistrust.”
–
Soul-searching scientists struggle to get message across
Mariëtte Le Roux
AFPApril 28, 2017
“Scientists have to go back to basics — thorough vetting and peer review to limit research mistakes and fraud, and resisting the temptation to exaggerate findings in a quest for prestige or funding.
–
“It’s important for the science community to be responsible in the way they communicate the science, so as not to sensationalise their own findings and not to try and just go for a headline rather than a much more… sober and factual presentation of findings, the EGU’s Bamber told AFP.”
Nothing like a smug German overreacting to a wise old Jew to make one rethink ones views on climate change eh?
I noticed a lot of comments along the lines of Catastrophic Climate Change is a strawman argument and you will not find catastrophic used in any peer-reviewed paper (you will, though, in economics when referring to climate change). All the hyperbole is saved for the press releases and press interviews where, apparently, its OK to embellish or even lie out right.
“When I interviewed James Hansen I asked him to speculate on what the view outside his office window could look like in 40 years with doubled CO2. I’d been trying to think of a way to discuss the greenhouse effect in a way that would make sense to average readers. I wasn’t asking for hard scientific studies. It wasn’t an academic interview. It was a discussion with a kind and thoughtful man who answered the question. You can find the description in two of my books, most recently The Coming Storm.”
“Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany, is the latest scientist to write publicly to the New York Times detailing
his reasons for cancelling
their subscriptions.”
Interesting detail. But who should believe that Rahmstorf canceled PIK newspaper subscriptions.
Certainly in the cafeteria the latest issues of NYT, WSJ, SPIEGEL, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche newspaper, etc. are still ready on the shelves.
Certainly these newspapers are too archived with cross references to articles by PIK and similar climate-activist stories.
Storm in a glass of water.
That is a storm in a teacup in the English speaking world, it is also what may be called a chink in the armour of the feral believers. This is wonderful as the doubt creeps in to those that are not fully brainwashed.