As a scientist, I have long been troubled by the way the mainstream media covers science in general and the environment in particular. Long before “global warming” became a watchword and Al Gore started burning tens of thousands of gallons in aviation fuel to lecture people around the world about their profligate energy use, journalists routinely butchered scientifically-focused stories so badly that it would make a high school physics teacher cringe. While many people have been shocked to learn how close the ties between leading global warming alarmists and some environmental reporters are, the only surprise for many of us in the scientific community is that it has taken this long to reveal those connections. For the truth is that global warming coverage in the mainstream media is merely a symptom of a larger disease.

The latest boil to burst forth upon the body of environmental journalism began to fester on Thursday, January 7, when the USEPA announced that it was proposing the latest, greatest and most-badly- needed-ever smog standard. (Officially the pollutant is “ground-level ozone”, but we’ll stick with “smog” for convenience). Mainstream media outlets everywhere fell over themselves to heap praise on the EPA for imposing a standard that administrator Lisa Jackson described as “long overdue.” This lead, from the Chicago Tribune’s lead environmental reporter/head Sierra Club cheerleader Michael Hawthorne’s January 8 story, was typical:

“Chicago and other urban areas across the U.S. would need to clamp down harder on air pollution under tough smog limits proposed Thursday by the Obama administration, which scrapped a George W. Bush-era rule that ignored the latest scientific advice.”

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Trillions of dollars are at stake in the man-made global warming debate.  The Climategate scandal – where leaked emails and computer programs involve dozens of prominent scientists worldwide – has almost everything one would want in a good scandal: conspiracies, fraud, possible destruction of documents, and lots of heated exchanges.  But the media has been reluctant to look into the problems and even when the controversy has been acknowledged it has been quickly dismissed as unimportant.

Newsweek poo-poohed Climategate as just showing “a few scientists in a bad light” and that “there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.”  The New York Times editorialized that “no one should be misled by all the noise” and that global warming was just too important “to let one set of purloined e-mail messages undermine the science and the clear case for action.”  Former Vice President Al Gore has been in full swing doing interviews the last few weeks, and the media has rarely challenged any of his claims.  Gore told Slate: “What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.”  He made the same comment unchallenged on MSNBC.  Yet, the thousand emails were written over thirteen years, and went right up through this year. (more…)