Santa Fe New Mexican: On op-ed pages, the climate science wars go on, and now we get a cherry-picking charge
by Charlie Petit, Knight Science Journalism Tracker, February 7, 2011
Climate gate sure put a ding in ability to track climate news like other news. So much politics, often expounded by people with little interaction with the practice of science, dominates the news.In that vein, in the last few weeks a sharp back-and-forth has played on the pages of the Santa Fe New Mexican. It began, one learns, in coverage of a paper that former senator Harrison Schmitt, a geologist and Apollo astronaut who is among the few scientists to have donned a spacesuit before the space station era, sent to NASA. Now firmly on the denier and contrarian side of argument, Schmitt declared that Arctic sea ice is at the same level it was in 1989, Greenland is gaining and not losing ice, and North America and Europe are now dominated by cold winters and cool summers.
To its credit, the New Mexican ran a reply in late January by a University of New Mexico climate scientist of some repute, Mark Boslough. It’s a full-throated reiteration, along with asides on the contrarians’ habit of “making stuff up and smearing honest scientists,” of the scientific consensus that all those things that Schmitt said above are right are actually wrong, and that the IPCC, climate gate or no climate gate, has things basically correct.
That in turn brought an equally full-throated blast in the New Mexican’s op-ed pages a few days later by the head of the conservative and climate contrarian Heartland Institute, Joseph Bast. He says basically, amid some unkind words about Boslough’s characterization of the kinds of scientists that appeal to the Heartland Institute, that Schmitt’s assertions are correct enough to pass muster.
The final piece in this triptych went up a few days later at the Huffington Post, where hydrologist and active climate change worrier Peter Gleick hunted up some data to refute Bast (and a hat-tip to Gleick for letting us know abut this series of exchanges). His point, well-made, is that Mr. Bast included some egregiously cherry-picked data to make his argument that Arctic sea ice is not in retreat, not at all. That plot up top is of data that show, for one brief interval, 1989 sea ice coverage was in fact lower than it was for the corresponding moment in 2009. QED. Gleick asks, if this figure was your financial record, “would you claim with a straight face that you had more money in 2009 than 1989?”
Speaking of the polemics that have overwhelmed coverage of climate science, the other day while waiting for a haircut in a little shop on UC Berkeley’s North Side, I killed time in the little news stand next door. I picked up a copy of a liberal magazine that in this town is dead center politically. What caught my eye, among its cover’s listings, was:
- The Nation – Mark Hertsgaard: Confronting the Climate Cranks; An extract, with a news update, from Hertsgaard’s book Hot: Living through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. One doubts that taking his advice and just calling the contrarians cranks will improve the climate dialog much, however much one might sympathize with the instinct to do so.
That could be news. I didn’t recall seeing anything of this counter-contrarian verbal assault in the news. But looking around it did get a smidgen of coverage.
- San Francisco Gate – Michael Brune: Generation Hot; Yep, another op-ed, in essence. This is the SF Chronicle parent’s website, and Bruneis executive director of the Sierra Club, and its basically a review of of Hertsgaard’s book.
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