Distorting The Pope's Words:
Fox News, Daily Mail and Drudge Claim Pope Condemns Scientists as the "Prophets of Doom"


There are probably over a billion people out there that would hope that if one person on the planet that could be exempt from the often slanderous and distorting hands of sensationalist reporters it would be the holiest of holies, the Pope. However, that assumption has just been proved wrong. Earlier this month the Vatican released a transcript of a speech given by Pope Benedict XVI. Following the Pope's address The Daily Mail ran the rather sensationalist headline "The Pope condemns the climate change prophets of doom." The Daily Mail described the Pope's speech as:

a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology. The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

This was picked up by the Drudge Report, Fox News, the Heartland Institute and several other media outlets that seem to cater to industry friendly figureheads. Naturally this created garboil for some and motivated others into a tempestuous uprising. PZ Myers Ph.D. runs a highly visited science/politics/evolution blog named Pharyngula that bears the self descriptive motif "random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal" and seems to take great pride in comparing the Pope to lizards. He of course reacted with a rather predictable backlash:

IRONY OVERLOAD! The pope opened his mouth again. ....so let us be uninhibited by ideological pressure and throw the words of that pretentious old man in the trash.

There were even those that used this as an excuse to call the Pope "a nazi, who is pro child molestor." So what did the pope say? Well among other things he said (emphasis mine):

We need to care for the environment: it has been entrusted to men and women to be protected and cultivated with responsible freedom, with the good of all as a constant guiding criterion. ... Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow.

Clearly something is amiss here. This is something most of the climate consensus supporters find perfectly reasonable. Nature, a top of the line peer-review scientific journal that also runs a news column, printed an article titled "Wise words from the Vatican" which described the Pope's statement as "simply the one that any reasonable person would make."

So how did The Daily Mail find enough ammo to support their position? Well maybe it has to do with the following quote from the Pope:

It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances.

The only way I can possibly read this as critical of the "prophets of doom", which doesn't appear in the popes speech, is if he looked at the skeptics while saying "experts and people of wisdom" and stared at everyone on this massive list while saying "ideological pressure". As far as I can tell that simply did not happen.

While high profile organizations like drudge and highly visited "godless liberal" blogs like Pharyngula took The Daily Mail's demonizing report hook line and sinker other outlets like the liberal Daily Kos and Deltoid's Tim Lambert actually took the time to read the Pope's words.

Tim Lambert concluded that Simon Caldwell, the author of the inflammatory and possibly defamatory Daily Mail article, is a "liar". Pericles, who writes for Daily Kos, ended his analysis by giving a few very wise words of wisdom:

So here's the moral of my story: When the media tells you that somebody said something surprising, don't react, check. Your first response shouldn't be: "How can he say that!" It should be: "Did he really say that?" Very often the answer will be No

This is something that cannot be said enough. Meanwhile the New York Times, despite being part of the "elite media", seems confused. One of their staff-editors ended a column with:

Is the Pope really a righteous skeptic? Or, per what the Mail has to .... is he trying to head off the green fundies at the pass?”

This whole ordeal, from the "prophets of doom" to throwing the Pope "in the trash", reminds me of some words of wisdom I read a few days ago:

Talent is way over-rated.
Insults get results -- and pay the electric bill.
Just ask Ann Coulter.

In conclusion the largest and most "elite" media outlets (NYT's, Fox News, Daily Mail, Drudge) and blogs (Pharyngula) all performed very poorly and deserve nothing less than an opprobrium. On other hand the smaller media outlets (Nature) and blogs (Deltoid, Pericles from Daily Kos) performed admirably. Mistakes happen and everyone deserves grace of all the people that reported. However, this is just one more day where I find the quality of writing is inversely proportional to the number of people that read it.


Edit:
After reviewing over a 100 hits on this topic (the vast majority were blogs) it turns out that Christian Science Monitor and the Spectator screw up while the Guardian gets it right.

Sources:

• MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI FOR THE CELEBRATION OF THE WORLD DAY OF PEACE 1 JANUARY 2008 THE HUMAN FAMILY, A COMMUNITY OF PEACE
• New York Times, December 12, 2007, 9:29 am News Flash: Pope Prefers People to Polar Bears, Tobin Harshaw
• Wise words from the Vatican, 20 December 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2007.394
• Drudge Report
• Daily Mail
• Christian Science Monitor, Many religious leaders back climate-change action A desire to exercise stewardship over the environment is growing among evangelical Christians. By Brad Knickerbocker from the December 20, 2007 edition
• Guardian, Twisting the Pope's words on climate change, Ben Goldacre Saturday December 15 2007
• Plantation Life for the "Pope of Doom" image
  

Fake News by Fox News & Washington Times Editorial Board

Not too long ago we reported how conservative blogs and even a NYT's editorial had horribly misleading or even blatantly false statements that would have readers believe 1934 was the warmest year on earth. Well Media Matters caught Fox News making distortions as well:

Transcript:

ANGLE: The man behind the website climateaudit.org has forced NASA to admit it was wrong when it said that 1998 was the hottest year on record. Steve McIntyre had to reverse-engineer NASA's figures because the agency refused to give him the formula it used to make the claim. And McIntyre found out NASA had made a serious mistake. NASA eventually agreed and now says 1934 was the hottest year, followed by 1998, then 1921. In fact, five of the hottest 10 years on record occurred before World War II.

Nowhere do they mention the difference between global and US averages. As for NASA refusing to release the forumalas well that's false as well. The algorithms, issues and choices are outlined in excruciating detail in the relevant papers. To Fox's credit their website does carry an article by a journalist from The Times that correctly reports what went on and even provides a link to the memo (pdf format) written by NASA's head climate honcho James Hansen.

Washington Times

Also, it looks like the Washington Post Op-eds has joined the misinformation foray:

But last week, it emerged that NASA had quietly restated its numbers, without fanfare or so much as a press release, after a blogger pointed out faulty methodology. Now, per NASA: 1934 is hottest, followed by 1998, 1921, 2006 and 1931.

So what does NASA's current temperature graph look like? Well here you go:



Or go to NASA direct. Just make sure you look at the GLOBAL temperature graphs. It's pretty obvious that 1934 is not the warmest year on global record. I'm sure the readers would appreciate how so many news outlets left that little factoid out. The op-ed then makes an assault on other news outlets as well as the science itself:

Only one thing is certain: The political debate over global warming has rushed far ahead of the science. [snip]The media coverage amid this confusion has been execrable. Last week's Newsweek purports to take readers inside the world of "Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine" without mentioning that the global-warming alarmists are even better funded, in some cases with government support. Naturally, Newsweek is not very interested in the recent data restatement.

For a more detailed and correct analysis of what actually went on please read my previous post on the subject. One might think the entire editorial board of the Washington Times would not make such a grievous error. All it takes it sending one single email off to NASA or reading realclimate.org.


Sources:
Washington Post, The hottest year: 1934?, August 15, 2007
FoxNews, Blogger Forces NASA to Tweak Climate Data, David Byers,Friday, August 17, 2007
Media Matters,Fox's Angle misrepresented NASA correction to claim 1934 is now "hottest year" on record, Sun, Aug 12, 2007 2:49pm ET

NASA's Top Dog Debunks the "1934 Y2K bug" nonsense

James Hansen, one of the world's best climate scientists, is getting little bothered by the nonsense running through the conservative blogs and mainstream media. Today he released response (PDF warning) to address this issue.

Big Correction or Little Correction?

Below is what Hansen calls the more-or-less-automatic US temperature graph. The green line visible on the right illustrates the difference between the correction and the old data:



Below is the comparison of global averages. As you can (or actually can't) see there is no discernible green line. This is because the old and the new line match so closely the difference isn't detectable to the naked eye in this graph. Clearly there was no major revision to global temps like many blogs are saying.



So it seems that a mistake is incredibly small.

Who or What Made the Mistake?

If you read Hansen's PDF you will understand that these graphs are "more-or-less-automatic"-ally generated from "near-real-time data streams" distributed by NOAA. Apparently NOAA changed the format of the near-real-time data streams and failed to notify NASA. So NASA's automated process took the data like nothing had ever happened and generated a graph. An article at the conservative blog American Thinker claims it was a Y2K bug:

It's a wild and technical story of compromised weather stations and hack computer algorithms (including, get this - a latent Y2K bug)

This is clearly incorrect. The bug was a result of a lack of communication between two agencies.

1934 and US *Global* Warming

Many blogs are making a big deal about 1934 and using this year to debunk the entire theory of global warming. Yet in a 2001 paper James Hansen said the following:

The U.S. annual (January-December) mean temperature is slightly warmer in 1934 than in 1998 in the GISS analysis

So even here there is nothing new. 1934 has been officially ranked hotter than 1998 since at least 2001. Well, at least in the U.S. Yet the differences are so minor that the heat crown could belong to either one. From the same paper:

In comparing temperatures of years separated by 60 or 70 years the uncertainties in various adjustments (urban warming, station history adjustments, etc.) lead to an uncertainty of at least 0.1°C. Thus it is not possible to declare a record U.S. temperature with confidence until a result is obtained that exceeds the temperature of 1934 by more than 0.1°C.

But this is for the USA only. If you look at GLOBAL temperatures 1934 is cooler than 1998 by a wide margin.

The Hottest *Global* Year

The UK's Climate Research Unit ranks 1998 while NASA ranks 2005 as the warmest. The difference is because CRU doesn't estimate arctic temperatures in areas where there aren't surface stations to take readings. The arctic is a key difference due to a concept called polar amplification which is the theory that the north pole will heat up faster than the south pole. Polar amplification is one of many smoking guns of global warming.




Sources:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/distro_LightUpstairs_70810.pdf
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/realdeal.16aug20074.pdf
American Thinker, Revised Temp Data Reduces Global Warming Fever, Marc Sheppard, August 09, 2007
Hansen, J.E., R. Ruedy, Mki. Sato, M. Imhoff, W. Lawrence, D. Easterling, T. Peterson, and T. Karl, 2001: A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change. J. Geophys. Res., 106, 23947-23963, doi:10.1029/2001JD000354.
New York Times, Opinionator