Appearing on Larry King Live last evening to honor the retiring host, former vice president Al Gore spoke publicly for the first time since the National Enquirer reported he was investigated for soliciting sex from a masseuse in a Portland, Oregon hotel.

It was all a misunderstanding. I was indeed staying at the Hotel Lucia that night.  Checking my e-mail on the lobby computer, I found an anonymous message, with attachments, claiming prominent climatologists I’d been working with had been fudging numbers.

Visibly disturbed, I printed the material and started for my suite to study it in private when the night manager asked if he could help.  In jest, I replied, yes, find someone skilled in massaging climate data and send that person to my room.

Later, someone knocked on my door.  It was the masseuse.  She told me she had never massaged data before, but she thought shiatsu and a light touch on the keyboard would do the trick.  When I explained the mix-up, she laughed.  We talked a bit, and she left.  End of story.

(more…)

When it comes to environmental topics, the biggest failing of the lazy, old media is not what they tell you, but what they leave unsaid. Yesterday’s release of the American Lung Association’s State of the Air 2010 report provides textbook examples of how mainstream journalists can’t, or won’t, take the time to do their jobs. Most MSM stories covering the ALA report read like slightly modified versions of an ALA press release, which, one suspects, was probably the case. Consider this talking point that the ALA kindly provided:

The report finds that unhealthy air posed a threat to the lives and health of more than 175 million people—roughly 58 percent of the population.

Forbes’ Tim Kiladze dutifully regurgitated this misleading talking point back to readers:

The ALA found that over 175 million Americans, or 58% of the population, live in counties with unhealthy levels of either ozone or particle pollution.

That sounds pretty authoritative, doesn’t it? Downright scary too. Fifty-eight per cent of the population is at risk? But, having been trained in the sciences rather than journalism, when I read something like that, I can’t help but wonder: why aren’t people dropping in the streets if things are so bad? Or, put another way, what does a subjective term like “unhealthy air” actually mean? (more…)

Dear 111^th Congress,

I know that you are very busy these days pondering new ways to screw up health care and figuring out exactly how much money you need to spend in order to reduce the deficit, but you might want to take a moment to examine what’s going on at the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

You remember USEPA, right? Your predecessors created it and gave it the authority to ensure that America has clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. The Agency has been pretty darn successful at fulfilling that mission and it employs armies of scientists, attorneys, technicians and other professionals to accomplish the tasks assigned to it. Paying all of those troops is expensive, as in several billion dollars worth of expensive, but seeing as how new EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has inflated the Agency’s budget by almost 50%, there would seem to be little reason for USEPA to outsource its authority. Yet, that’s exactly what has been going on, and I thought that someone should bring the situation to your attention.

Now as we all know, George W. Bush was the worst environmental President in history. Unfortunately, this assertion is complicated by the embarrassing fact that the amount of pollutants in the nation’s air was reduced to the lowest levels that we have ever seen since the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970. It therefore behooves USEPA and the current administration to redefine the term “clean air” by redefining the standards that determine what is clean and what is dirty. Administrator Jackson has tackled this problem, publishing a new standard for nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) and proposing new standards for ozone and sulfur dioxide (SO₂). (more…)

If you were around in the sixties, you remember the scene: the family gathers around the TV, listening to Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra explain in delicious detail what was about to happen as a digital clock on the corner of the screen wound its way down to zero, ever so slowly. Then – finally – the roar of the mightiest engines every built. The cheers. The majestic sight of a Saturn V creeping up past the launch gantry as mission control solemnly declared: “Lift off. We have lift off at seven minutes past the hour.”

It was heady stuff, in a world of endless possibilities. We knew, without a doubt, that we could go anywhere, do anything and that we would continue to answer the burning human question that has driven mankind to new heights for millennia: what’s out there?

The President of the United States, according to this story in the Orlando Sentinel, doesn’t seem to share that sense of wonder or to understand the educational, societal and economic value that comes along with indulging natural human curiosity about the universe we live in. If he has his way, Obama will replace the sonorous call to “boldly go where no man has gone before” with a mere murmur, to blandly study what everyone has been studying for years. (more…)

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.”

(more…)