Newsweek against "deniers": three responses

Thanks to Professor Lubos Motl of Harvard:

Monday, August 06, 2007

Newsweek against "deniers": three responses

Sharon Begley has what is known as a poultry brain - the readers of TRF also know her as the author of a lousy, but not the lousiest, article on string theory - but she has a huge, fanatically believing religious heart, especially if the task is to parrot musings by scientific titans such as Barbara Boxer, Al Gore, and Naomi Oreskes. So she decided to write, together with a few collaborators, another Goebbelsian article in Newsweek,

Global warming deniers: a well-funded machine

It is full of insults, "corrupt deniers". The criminal reasons why skeptics do what they do are "explained" in detail: for example, Pat Michaels needs some extreme weather to grow his award-winning pumpkins. ;-) But the article doesn't contain facts that would be both relevant and true. The only fair part of the article is the cover of the magazine (on the left) as long as you omit the silly footnote and the somewhat exaggerated color of the Earth (assuming it is supposed to be Earth) :-).

Marc Morano responds here, explaining, among many other interesting things, that the alarmists have actually received 2500 times more funding (50 billion vs 19 million per decade) than the skeptics.

Another response comes from

Noel Sheppard
Amy Ridenour

Ratings: Begley only gets 2 stars, Lindzen's article in Newsweek had 4 stars. A poll next to Lindzen's article showed that 54% of readers think that there is no permanent momentum to fight global warming. The poll attached to Begley's article shows that 40% of the readers think that global warming is not a major threat to life on Earth while 6% are not sure.