Newsweek stands up to the naysayers

Kudos to Newsweek.

I don't have a subscription, so I don't know if this is last week's issue or this one's. But all I know is I was happy to see this - on the cover, no less:

(the footnote reads: "*Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change. Inside the denial machine.")

So much of the American media up until this point has treated global warming's existence as a political question - phrasing such as "some scientists believe that...", giving global warming deniers the same screen time as reputable scientists, and so on and so forth. For Newsweek to take the issue out of the arena of political "debate" and depict it as what it is - science under attack - is not only brave journalism, but crucial at this stage in history. One key thing the article mentions again and again is that the "denial machine", as they call it, worked not only to kill climate change bills in congress, but to keep the public skeptical - and it is that skepticism, perhaps even more than the ineptitude of congress itself, is what is preventing action more than anything else at this stage.

Hopefully this will be the one of the first actions taken by the mainstream media to take the global warming discussion out of its politicized, pseudo-scientific bubble of "legitimacy" and "consensus", and place it into actual significant discourse about what needs to be done - the real question we all need to be asking.

Excerpt:

Killing bills in Congress was only one prong of the denial machine's campaign. It also had to keep public opinion from demanding action on greenhouse emissions, and that meant careful management of what federal scientists and officials wrote and said. "If they presented the science honestly, it would have brought public pressure for action," says Rick Piltz, who joined the federal Climate Science Program in 1995. By appointing former coal and oil lobbyists to key jobs overseeing climate policy, he found, the [Bush] administration made sure that didn't happen. Following the playbook laid out at the 1998 meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, officials made sure that every report and speech cast climate science as dodgy, uncertain, controversial—and therefore no basis for making policy. Ex-oil lobbyist Philip Cooney, working for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, edited a 2002 report on climate science by sprinkling it with phrases such as "lack of understanding" and "considerable uncertainty." A short section on climate in another report was cut entirely. The White House "directed us to remove all mentions of it," says Piltz, who resigned in protest. An oil lobbyist faxed Cooney, "You are doing a great job."

The response to the international climate panel's latest report, in February, showed that greenhouse doubters have a lot of fight left in them. In addition to offering $10,000 to scientists willing to attack the report, which so angered [California Senator Barbara] Boxer, they are emphasizing a new theme. Even if the world is warming now, and even if that warming is due in part to the greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels, there's nothing to worry about. As [global warming denier and MIT meteorologist Richard] Lindzen wrote in a guest editorial in NEWSWEEK International in April, "There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe."

You can read the article in its entirety here - I recommend you do.