Sunday, February 18, 2007
In need of more skeptical skepticism
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Mary Bishop
Bishop lives in Roanoke and is a retired newspaper reporter.
One of the strongest points Al Gore makes in his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" is that American news reporters fail to accept the overwhelming scientific conclusion that global warming is a real threat to our planet.
As the film reports, a survey of 928 peer-reviewed scientific articles found unanimity that global warming is real and that human activity is the primary cause. More recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a careful, conservative panel of hundreds of scientists from 40 countries, declared unanimously that global warming is a worsening problem "very likely" caused by humans.
And yet, another study cited in the Gore film showed that many American news reporters continue to ignore the research and write about global warming as if it were merely a controversial theory.
Sadly, all these many months after the Oscar-nominated film was released, here in Roanoke we must add John Cramer's Jan. 25 article ("Global Warming in 60 Minutes") to the misinforming side of the ledger.
His story ostensibly was about John Richardson, a Franklin County environmental science teacher and one of 1,000 volunteers around the country recently trained by Gore to present educational programs on global warming. Richardson was chosen from among 20,000 people who applied for the training. He certainly was worthy of a feature article.
But rather than fully explore what Richardson and others in our region are doing to reduce greenhouse gases and begin the long process of reducing global warming, Cramer devoted seven paragraphs of his story to the views of Chicago's Heartland Institute, a well-known propaganda mill for tobacco, oil and other industries. A staff member he quotes calls global warming an "alarmist" concept that is not "justified" by science.
Would Cramer also feel compelled to include David Duke, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other Holocaust-deniers in a general piece about the Nazi exterminations?
Cramer's opening paragraph signals his apparent doubts about the science of global warming: "Western Virginia's odd winter -- swinging between 70-degree sunny days and tonight's temperatures dropping into the teens -- may have nothing to do with global warming." At least he could have put it more impartially: "Western Virginia's odd winter ... may or may not have anything to do with global warming."
Even if he had, emphasizing one winter's weather gives the impression that climate change is as simple as that. To reach their recent conclusion that global warming is "unequivocal," scientists around the world studied not only surface temperatures over the long term but also rising sea levels and temperatures, retreating ice, atmospheric trends, extreme weather events and many other factors.
Gore has warned that the news media too often fall for the abundant anti-science spin from organizations financed by the oil and automotive industries, which want neither regulation nor competitive sources of energy.
Cramer failed to report the following about Heartland Institute: According to exxonsecrets.org, Heartland disseminates research funded by the American Petroleum Institute and has received a half-million dollars since 1998 from ExxonMobil. Heartland's board members include executives from big oil and auto companies.
Yes, a reporter's job is to raise questions, but he should carefully examine all of his sources.
