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
  

NYT's Trumpets Bjørn Lomborg

A little background first. Bjørn Lomborg wrote an extremely controversial book called The Skeptical Environmentalist. This book launched a firestorm of controversy with the vast majority of mainstream scientists criticizing Lomborg. An editorial in the prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature described Lomborgs work as 'employs the strategy of those who argue that... Jews weren't singled out by the Nazis'. And National Academy of Science member Norman Myers said Lomborg had not done "a fraction of the homework that could give him a preliminary understanding of the science in question." Scientific American has a 12 page article titled "Misleading Math about the Earth" dedicated solely to debunking his book. Clearly Bjørn Lomborg is not a mainstream scientist. Recently the New York Times had two pieces on him. How did the NYT's author John Tierney science columnist and blogger describe him?

Dr. Lomborg believes in global warming but isn’t a zealot — he doesn’t refer to scientists who question the climate models as “denialists,” as if there were some revealed dogma about future climate. [snip] The lesson from our expedition is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped...

In both of NYT's pieces on Lomborg a book is mentioned. The title:

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming

That name has been used before. A quick look at Amazon shows that it's first review is none other than climate change critic and fiction author Michael Crichton. He of course gives the book a glowing review. However, the Washington Post's editorial review is in stark contrast of Crichton:

In one case after another, Lomborg asserts, it's cheaper and better to do nothing immediately to combat climate change, but instead to invest in other things.

The deepest flaw in Cool It is its failure to take into account the full range of future climate possibilities. The computer models project outcomes ranging from mild, which he acknowledges, to truly catastrophic, which he ignores. While the chances of catastrophic climate change may still be small, they are increasing: By comparing real world data with the 2001 IPCC projections, researchers have shown that the sea is rising more swiftly than even the worst case scenarios in the projections.

Lomborg's mantra is the supposedly high costs of dealing with climate change. The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is a detailed analysis of those costs, commissioned by the UK Treasury and reported to the prime minister. Stern, a senior government economist, argues that it's much cheaper to combat climate change than to live with the consequences.

It would appear that the NYT's needs a new science columnist. If there is one thing that the NYT's columnist is good at is realizing what he his. This is from John Tierney's bio:

John Tierney always wanted to be a scientist but went into journalism because its peer-review process was a great deal easier to sneak through.

That certainly seems to describe this situation rather nicely. In full disclosure this post does not intend to criticize Lomborg's solutions. This post is merely pointing out that the logic and supporting statistics used by Lomborg is clearly in conflict with statements given by numerous leading scientists and institutions. The NYT's columnist did not do an adequate job of informing their readers just how controversial Lomborg is.

Update: In the "Further Reading" box of links one, and only one, article Lomborg is cited. This article is also devoid of harsh statements made by Lomborg.

Update II:
The WSJ editorial board member Kimberly Strassel reviews his book in a similar manner:

On the other side are those who don't think that the Earth is warming; and even if it is, they don't think that man is causing it; and even if man is to blame, it isn't clear that global warming is bad; and even if it is, efforts to fix it will cost too much and may, in the end, do more harm than good. Standing in the practical middle is Bjorn Lomborg, the free-thinking Dane who, in "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (2001), challenged the belief that the environment is going to pieces.

Let it be known that the editorial board of the WSJ has avoided invitations from Scientific American to have a simple sit down with the worlds top scientists and learn the material.

Sources:
NYT's, Findings, ‘Feel Good’ vs. ‘Do Good’ on Climate, JOHN TIERNEY, Published: September 11, 2007
NYT's, Tierney Lab, A Cool Look at Global Warming: Your Turn to Take On Bjorn Lomborg, John Tierney, September 10, 2007
The New York Times, SCIENTIST AT WORK/Bjorn Lomborg; From an Unlikely Quarter, Eco-Optimism, NICHOLAS WADE, August 7, 2001

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

Skeptics/Deniers Less than 10%


The NY Times published a survey of Americans between the ages of 17-27. Some of the results:

53. Which comes closer to your view: 1. Global warming is a very serious problem and should be one of the highest priorities for government leaders OR 2. Global warming is serious but does not need to be a high priority OR 3. Global warming is not serious and can be addressed years from now.

• Very Serious and should be one of the highest priorities for government leaders
  All adults 52% Age 17-27 54%
  

• Serious, but does not need to be a high priority now
  All adults 37% Age 17-27 35%

• Not serious and can be addressed years from now.
  All adults 8% Age 17-27 10%

• Don't know/No answer
  All adults 3% Age 17-27 1%

Looks like the deniers are officially minimized among the general population.

Source:
NYT's, Young Americans Are Leaning Left, New Poll Finds, ADAM NAGOURNEY and MEGAN THEE, June 27, 2007