Remember that recent report (.pdf file) from the UN sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which stated the likelihood that human activity is at least 90% responsible for global warming? Well, Boston Globe conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby says the report was merely propaganda written by faceless bureaucrats and not actual climate scientists:
Chicken Little and global warming
Oddly enough, most of the news coverage neglected to mention that the document released on Feb. 2 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was not the latest multiyear assessment report, which will run to something like 1,500 pages when it is released in May. It was only the 21-page “Summary for Policymakers,” a document written chiefly by government bureaucrats — not scientists — and intended to shape public opinion….
There’s only one teeny-weeny, itsy-bitsy problem with Mr. Jacoby’s charge that scientists didn’t write the “Summary for Policy Makers” report released by the IPCC on February 5th of this year: It’s a complete fabrication. Here’s the truth about who authored the report from scientists who participated in the IPCC process and blog at Real Climate:
In fact, the actual authors of the official SPM are virtually all scientists, and are publically acknowleged. Moreover, the lead authors of the individual chapters are represented in the writing process leading to the SPM, and their job is to defend the basic science in their chapters. As lead author Gerald Meehl remarked to one of us on his way to Paris: “Scientists have to be ok, they have the last check. If they think the science is not represented, then they can send it back to the breakout groups.”
A common accusation at the time of the Third Assessment Report was that the SPM didn’t reflect the science in the rest of the report. A special National Academy panel was convened at the request of President GW Bush, to consider this and other issues. The Panel found no significant disconnect between the SPM and the body of the report. The procedure followed this time is not in essence any different from that which has been used for previous IPCC reports.
Gee, a right wing hack with no credentials as a scientist passes on a familiar canard about how the IPCC report was prepared in order to advance his agenda that global climate change is still controversial and may have nothing whatsoever to do with humanity’s burning fossil fuels and emitting billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the earth’s atmosphere each year.
But that’s what “fair and balanced” reporting means. If you’re the Boston Globe, you don’t bother fact check what your idiot wingnut columnist writes about global warming, despite the fact that a quick 5 minute google search was all that it took for me to disprove Mr. Jacoby’s big fat lie. That wouldn’t be fair, after all, to the people who prefer to be bamboozled by the likes of Mr. Jacoby and others of his ilk. Far better to balance your coverage of the global warming “controversy” by offsetting the fact based results of thousands of climate scientists with the utterly false blather of your non-scientist, resident wingnut columnist, Jeff Jacoby.
And they wonder why the Globe’s circulation and profitability is dropping like a stone.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change