NYTimes, then a bunch more: Al Gore arises from the snowstorm, says IPCC screwed a few things up, so what?
Quite a little news flurry followed former Vice President Al Gore‘s Op-Ed in the weekend NYTimes: We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change ; It’s a full-on fusillade, a broadside cannonade, a mass charge from the trenches and a take-no-guff revisit to all the jeremiads he’s written in the past. The former newspaperman writes subjunctively that without global warming, as some now crow in vindication to be the case, “We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands.” I guess he’s done it before, but I am not sure that he has previously labeled us, potentially and collectively, as criminals. I agree, actually, but them’s fightin’ words.
Personally, I like Gore’s allusion to historically recent shifts that he calls a “hubristic ‘bubble’ of market fundamentalism that (shifts) the boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere.” I dunno if it is original with him, but it is a dandy.
The essay promptly spawned reactions in other outlets. A notable one is at Fox News.It promptly filed without byline a story on its Science and Technology page that, in effect, takes credit at Fox News for having goaded Gore into breaking his long silence on ‘climategate’. I’d like to think the Times’s op-ed pages are so nimble as to schedule in two days such a long op-ed as this one, but suspect that it was in the works for longer than that. And today Fox columnist John Lott weighs in with What Gore Missed When He Broke His Silence. He tuts Al for not listing every flaw in IPCC reports, but Gore never said it was comprehensive (he writes about “at least two errors” that he gives as examples). And what about the fact-checking behind Lott’s assertion that while Arctic ice was at a record low in 2007, “recent years have shown the opposite pattern, with it rising by 19 percent.”?? What? 2007 is not recent? And anyway, right now the ice is where it was as the record low loomed on this date in 2007. Some rise.
I am guessing, but Fox may have been what Gore had in mind when he wrote that, in today’s tottering old-media world, “Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment…Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.”
Other Gore-Speaks-in-the-NYTimes Stories;
- The Australian – Brad Norington ; Gore concedes mistakes made on climate change ; This pub., like Fox, editorially slants against the idea that global warming is our fault and ours to fix. But this story shows that The Australian knows the norms of journalism and writes the news straight. The text backs up the hed and says Gore “admitted..mistakes,” but the overall piece is a fair summary of the NYT op-ed.
- USA Today Greenhouse blog – Wendy Koch: Al Gore wishes global warming wasn’t real ; Hmmm. Shouldn’t that be weren’t real? The piece asks readers to weigh in on the related issue of whether they think the US needs a cap and trade system passed soon.
- National Post (Can) Op-Ed – Adrian MacNair: Al Gore discovered in a giant block of ice in the Arctic ; Nat’l Post is also right of center. And this is labeled opinion, and the hed is funny. But holy cow, it is difficult for these eyes to read the rest without my wanting to hit the kill-screen button, if there were such a button.
Pertinent, but not explicitly:
- LA Times via Standard Net – Bill McKibben: Climate change skeptics sound like Simpson lawyers ; McKibben is a well-known science writer with a specialty in climate. Who’da thunk, a month or two ago, that Phil Jones at the Climatic Research Unit in the UK, might merit being called “the Mark Fuhrman of climate science” ?
- Charlie Petit
