Amy Goodman, producer of something called "Democracy Now" had this to say as she shared the state with James Hansen of NASA the other day:
Goodman blamed the ExxonMobil (NYSE:XOM) for what she insisted was a lack of coverage of the global warming issue for investing in public policy think tanks.
“[E]xxonMobil for example has pumped more than $8 million into 40 think tanks, which then provide so-called experts to the media to dismiss problems as such as global warming,” Goodman said. “These corporate Trojan horses are staples of American broadcasting – both public and private – that helps explain the reluctance of the U.S. media to even cover global warming. The topic gets three times as much coverage in the British newspapers as it does American papers.”
“When global warming does get coverage by the U.S.press, it’s present in false balance with the views of industry-sponsored skeptics,” Goodman said.
I would normally just ignore this woman as living in cloud-coocooland except that so much of the media seems so committed to this "alarmists are out-spent" meme, a theory that made no sense even before Al Gore starting collecting $300 million in advertising money to promote his investment fund promote climate alarmism. Heck, I have trouble even finding articles that mention the skeptic’s position, much less give it equal time. The article makes the same observation:
However, unbeknownst to Goodman, a recent Business & Media Institute study found “a meager 20 percent of stories even mentioned there were any alternative opinions to the so-called ‘consensus’ on the issue.” The study suggested there’s a bias that only gives one side of the global warming debate, the alarmist side – not the skeptic side.
It is appropriate that Goodman made her comments along with NASA’s James Hansen. Hansen is currently looking to set the Guiness record for most media citiations and quotes of a man who claims to be censored. He also is quite a censor himself, using his government position to go after textbook makers who even mention the skeptic’s position.
Ms. Goodman and Mr. Hansen are very typical fascists. They define media balance as "100% my position, and no time for the opposition." Note the definition of media corruption as "false balance."
What proportion of media time do you think should be given to denialists? Given that even at an extremely optimistic estimate, only 3% of scientific papers in recent years have tried to argue that mankind is not primarily responsible for the current global warming (and a more realistic value is 0%), then 20% of media stories giving credence to the denialists clearly means their views are being vastly over-represented.
I’ve noticed that many alarmists constantly scream about being victimized by sins that they themselves are more guilty of than anyone, such as cherry picking data; having a financial interest in the debate; and pointing to isolated weather events as evidence of their position.
“scientist”-
substantiate that 3% number you cite. i suspect it has little basis in fact and is, at best, an artifact of framing the question in a slanted way. are you using oreske’s survey?
“morganovich” – your suspicions, as always, come from ignorance. Oreskes did a search and found not a single paper in the peer-reviewed literature which questioned the basics of anthropogenic global warming. Benny Peiser repeated the experiment and claimed to have found 34 papers (out of 1117 – want to do the maths and tell me what percentage that corresponds to?) which “reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the “the observed warming over the last 50 years“.
3%! The whole rotten edifice must surely be crumbling down. Except that unfortunately most of the 34 clearly did not actually reject or doubt this view. One did – and it was not a paper but an editorial.
You see, as so often, if you were aware of the research that’s been done, and had actually read it, you wouldn’t make a fool of yourself. Try it before posting next time.
hahahahahahaha.
you are such a joke scientist and you walked right into the trap i set for you.
as you ought to have surmised by my asking you if you were referring to oreskes, i am quite familiar with her work and all the problems with her methodology and slant.
the oreskes piece is just slanted survey work. it’s easy to set them up that way. how you ask a question and what responses you permit will affect results. terms like “explicit endorsement” skew figures heavily. your inability to see through these simple rhetorical tricks and statistical charlatanry goes a long way toward explaining your inability to grasp this stuff.
she cherry picks 928 abstracts out of over 10,000 papers published during the period and still most of the pieces she surveyed were neutral. 42% of them don’t even mention human causes at all and most of her “implicit acceptance” category were papers about mitigating effects of climate change and had no relevance to whether or not it was actually happeneing. it is not the business of good scientists to speak of complex partially understood systems in certainties. explicit claims on both sides are pretty much unsupportable.
how can any good scientist claim that “most of the change is caused by humans” when they can’t delineate all the natural process going on. it’s just flat out impossible. it’s an almost sure sign of bad science. ask a good scientist to claim certainty under such conditions, and he will not. ask a sensationalist one, and he will.
and, the most recent papers surveyed by oreskes were from 2003, so it’s a dated piece.
if you accept her methodology, then you’re screwed. schulte used her same methodology on the papers published from 2004-2007. only 7% endorsed the “consensus” of the IPCC.
so, either the methodology you cite is slanted and valueless
or
the “consensus” has not existed since 2004.
which way do you prefer to be wrong?
once more, your “data” fails to stand up.
face it, it’s time to hang up your “scientist” moniker, join a 12 step plan for trolls, and change your name to “bus driver”.
Given Scientist opening question, “What proportion of media time do you think should be given to denialists?” and then reading the sources he quotes, I’d say that three times the amount of media time should go to skeptics than should go to alarmists. I’m not sure why Scientist decided to use that particular source when it seems to disprove any point he was trying to make. Peiser showed that Oreska’s findings (supposedly showing a scientific consensus) were innacurate.
Scientist may be correct that Reiser’s study shows that only 3% of the scientific papers assert that “mankind is not primarily responsible for the current global warming” – but the same study shows that only 1% “explicitly endorse the ‘consensus view'” of AGW.
RESULTS
Only 13 (or 1%) explicitly endorse the ‘consensus view’.
34 abstracts reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the “the observed warming over the last 50 years”.
44 abstracts focus on natural factors of global climate change.
“Quite a number of papers emphasise that natural factors play a major if not the key role in recent climate change (4). My analysis also shows that there are almost three times as many abstracts that are sceptical of the notion of anthropogenic climate change than those that explicitly endorse it (5, 6, 7).
In fact, the explicit and implicit rejection of the ‘consensus view’ is not restricted to individual scientists. It also includes distinguished scientific organisations such as the American Association of Petroleum Geologists:
“The earth’s climate is constantly changing owing to natural variability in earth processes. Natural climate variability over recent geological time is greater than reasonable estimates of potential human-induced greenhouse gas changes. Because no tool is available to test the supposition of human-induced climate change and the range of natural variability is so great, there is no discernible human influence on global climate at this time” (8)
This is not to deny that there is a majority of publications that, although they do not empirically test or confirm the view of anthropogenic climate change, go along with it by applying models based on its basic assumptions. Yet, it is beyond doubt that a sound and unbiased analysis of the full ISI databank will find hundreds of papers (many of which written by the world’s leading experts in the field) that have raised serious reservations and outright rejection of the concept of a “scientific consensus on climate change”. The truth is, that there is no such thing!
In light of the data presented above (evidence that can be easily verified), Science should withdraw Oresekes’ study and its results in order to prevent any further damage to the integrity of science.
References
5) H.R. Linden (1996) The evolution of an energy contrarian. Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, 21:31-67.
6) Russian scientists K. Kondratyev and C Varotsos criticise “the undoubtfully overemphasised contribution of the greenhouse effect to the global climate change”. K. Kondratyev and C Varotsos (1996). Annual Review of Energy and the Environment. 21: 31-67
7) M.E. Fernau, W.J. Makofske, D.W. South (1993) Review and Impacts of climate change uncertainties. Futures 25 (8): 850-863.
8) L.C. Gerhard and B.M. Hanson (2000) AAPG Bulletin 84 (4): 466-471
470 (or 42%) abstracts include the keywords “global climate change” but do not include any direct or indirect link or reference to human activities, CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions, let alone anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change.
Oooooh, a trap! What fun! You are clearly having a very jolly time, morganovich.
JimBeaux – Peiser (not Reiser)’s study was rejected by Science. It did not show that Oreskes’ (not Oreska’s) study was inaccurate. Read the 34 ‘dissenting’ abstracts and judge for yourself.
Why base it on decades worth of scientific studies? The media report news. Base it on the latest studies if anything. With 24 hour news, even Schute, with his “only 7% endorsed the ‘consensus’ of the IPCC,” will soon be dated. Taking this into account, the Business & Media Institute study should have found over 90% instead of a measly 20% in which the skeptics were often derided. And don’t forget, much of the 80% were celebrities, average Joe’s and other non-scientists. Perhaps Amy must be upset at the difficulty in finding enough scientific authorities on this broad subject.
John M Reynolds
something called “Democracy Now”
It’s a CPUSA organ on public access cable.
i am having a jolly time!
thanks for noticing!
though perhaps “trap” is the wrong phrase to use.
a better way of putting it would be “i’ll bet if i put this cliff in front of him, he’ll walk off of it.”
but the effect is pretty much the same.
how you ask a question and what responses you permit will affect results… Glad you are having fun but you are are also making a complete tit of yourself. You obviously have no idea what Oreskes did if you think she asked anyone any questions.
Schulte! Ha ha ha. An endocrinologist, publishing in Energy and Environment, who plagiarised from Peiser anyway. Oh yes, that’s a good one.
and yet you refute none of the data.
most of her survey was irrelevant and her data were cherry picked and her categorization scheme was biased. and asking a question referst ot how she determined if a paper made explicit or implicit claims etc. scoring for such things is inherently somewhat arbitrary. all she did was scan abstracts. but the way in which she did it was biased.
but this is somewhat irrelevant.
schulte used HER system to do his work you dolt.
so you are trapped:
either you must say that her results are valid and therefore so are schulte’s (as he used the same system) and accept both the low number of explicit backers for AGW in her and his studies
or
you must say that the study is invalid.
you don’t get to use the study that suits you and not the one that doesn’t.
an overall breakdown of the oreskes study:
* Of all 1117 abstracts that ought have been included using her 3 search terms, only 13 (or 0.1%) explicitly endorse the ‘consensus view’.
* 322 abstracts (or 29%) implicitly accept the ‘consensus view’ but mainly focus on impact assessments of envisaged global climate change.
* Less than 10% of the abstracts (89) focus on “mitigation”.
* 67 abstracts mainly focus on methodological questions.
* 87 abstracts deal exclusively with paleo-climatological research unrelated to recent climate change.
* 34 abstracts reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the “the observed warming over the last 50 years”.
* UPDATE: among the 34 abstracts, a few of them were found that shouldn’t have been included in the group. For one example, see Prometheus (search for Oreskes); the reader is recommended to look at the 34 abstracts whether this error of Peiser’s analysis changes the qualitative conclusions
* 44 abstracts focus on natural factors of global climate change.
* 470 (or 42%) abstracts include the keywords “global climate change” but do not include any direct or indirect link or reference to human activities, CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions, let alone anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change.
so as can be readily seen, her results do not support the conclusions about consensus that you keep claiming they do. it really doesn’t support much of anything. science should be hideously embarrassed to have published it.
oh, and that should be 1%, not 0.1% explicit endorsement. typo.
You utter cretin. low number of explicit backers for AGW – yes, a low number of scientists that bother to state the obvious. What a surprise eh! The 34 abstracts allegedly defying the ‘consensus’ did not do so. Schulte’s work was published in an unrecognised journal, which had previously said his work was ‘a bit patchy and nothing new‘. This is a comprehensive examination of Schulte’s work.
Moronic 12 year olds may very well worship the ground Schulte walks on. Oreskes’ work has not been refuted, her methodology was sound, and only denialist fuckwits of the very worst sort bother to try to suggest that Peiser or Schulte have anything valuable or accurate to say on this topic.
Scientist,
You were first to use profanities. YOU LOSE!!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Why don’t y’all go and do your own review of the papers rather than trying to support known FLAWED papers just because they say what you WANT them to say?
hahahahahaha.
you’re funny when you get all steamed up. take a breath before you pop a vein.
a low number that state the obvious? you should change your name to “court jester”.
a low number who make a ludicrous and unsupportable claim is more like it.
and i see you have nothing to refute that the data that it oreske’s work showed little explicit support from her claims and contained mostly irrelevant pieces.
that mashey dog’s breakfast never really does get at the facts, does it? it’s just a long, rambling rant about “denialists” and nothing like a serious discourse about survey design and results.
nice work.
you should read that stuff before you post it
and if oreske’s methods are solid, then why did they yield such perverse results when applied to 2004-7?
schulte is an idiot for using the methods you back? you are one mixed up guy “scientist”.
what kind of scientist do you claim to be anyhow? people ask you all the time and you never answer.
i’m starting to suspect you are a psychology researcher studying the effects of nonsensical arguments and illogic used on unsuspecting internet users…
I’m starting to think Scientist is a provocateur. For you young ‘uns, that’s what trolls were called prior to the internet.
I am not a scientist but I slept at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Exxon-Mobil’s biggest crime is that it doesn’t pay its protection money to Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and PETA. If they would cough up the money, the vilification would stop.
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
How is Oreskes’s paper, as you call it, really ‘methodologically sound’?
I find it quite odd that in the initial paper that was published, her search terms weren’t clear. According to the article, “climate change” was the set of keywords used, and only when others began to question the results was it corrected to “global climate change”. Why was ‘global’ omitted to begin with? Either it was intentional, or it was erroneous. If it was intentional than there must have been a deliberate attempt to mislead, which I sincerely doubt, or it was erroneous, meaning that it wasn’t held to that much scrutiny before being published.
That subsequent rebuttals (not just Peiser) have never been published, speaks more to me of that publication’s bias than it does to the strength or weakness of any paper that has been rejected by it.
As for ExxonMobil, I find it highly amusing that $8 million spread out between 40 organizations (to a tune of $200K each) can somehow set the media agenda, but the 2007 annual budget for Environmental Defence at $73 million and WWF at over $160 million have no impact at all? That’s not even factoring Greenpeace or the countless other groups who are also a lot more well-funded.