Chi. Trib., LA Times: Climate scientists push back, sure, but some don’t like this story’s version.
No sooner had the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune published a story by Neela Banerjee, of their Washington Bureau, on a coordinated response from scientists to climate change doubters than they inserted a fast clarification.
It turns out there is indeed such an organized campaign, with a Minnesota researcher, John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas, running it. There also is a re-play of an American Geophysical Union public and press information services to provide climate experts to answer questions. But the Trib and Times story originally provided this AGU program as further evidence of a concerted and explicit campaign against the legions of political enemies of climate change science.
It you read that story linked in the first graf, you’ll notice the clarification inserted part way through. It’s a small clarification that may not change the story’s impact much, but it is something.
This is rather rapid reaction by the newspapers’ publisher to an AGU statement issued explicitly to quarrel with the papers’ version of events. At a guess, one might expect also to see a letter to the editor further clarifying the AGU’s reaction. But speaking of haste, the AGU statement is aimed only at the Times. As far as I can tell the Tribune is equally involved, if not primary, in the story’s origin.
One can quibble with whether the AGU’s effort is consciously, if not officially, intended to push the public conversation toward something based more or less on reality and data, with the rising political chorus against the scientific consensus in mind. But whatever the thoughts or hopes behind it – and the AGU has assembled panels of experts before to answer such queries so this is not such a new thing – one must concede it is not overtly a political effort aimed at anything but, um, ignorance of any political stripe.
More interesting is to compare the quick reaction at the Tribune and Times to the long struggle reported yesterday, in the next post down on on this site, on one British scientist’s long struggle to get a correction in the Sunday Times. It has to be recognized that the scale of the offense in the UK is larger.
The story is already, natch, circulating on the blogosphere,without the clarification, as seen here.
- Charlie Petit
