Saturday, November 28, 2009

So which of those two columns do you think the Sydney Morning Herald chose to run today?


British warming crusader George Monbiot has written two recent columns on denialism.
The first, three weeks ago, castigated the alleged denialism of sceptics:
There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere which cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.
The second, just three days ago, castigated the alleged denialism of Monbiot’s fellow warmists:
I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can’t possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.
So which of those two columns do you think the Sydney Morning Herald chose to run today - the dated one attacking sceptics (again) or the new one attacking the warmists now refusing to confront the greatest scientific scandal of their faith?

This is not just denial but deceit. Monbiot is made to seem as if he’s reacting to the revolt of the Liberal sceptics against their warmist leader, when in fact that revolt was driven in (small) part by the very scandal that he accepts is genuine.

UPDATE

The mainstream media - with a handful of (conservative) exceptions - do not know what terrible damage they are doing to their credibility by ignoring or drastically downplaying the Climategate scandal. The story is out, a couple of million times over, on the Internet.

What do you think the people reading of this scandal there conclude when they then turn to, say, The Age or the ABC, and find there barely a word of coverage?

I’ll tell you: they’ll conclude that the media cannot be trusted to tell even the news, let alone the truth, when it conflicts with their agenda. Hear that from the ABC’s Melbourne talkback host Jon Faine himself when he explained why he would not even discuss the emails:
That was my assessment of whether this was actually of any significance or not, and I decided that it wasn’t and we wouldn’t spend time on it. It suits the conspiracy theorists beautifully
The other thing these readers will conclude is that for news involving certain ideologies, they must of necessity turn to the Internet, and in particular to certain blogs they trust to speak freely. For all those in the ABC and Age who deplore the influence of my blog, my sincere thanks for your part this week in making it more essential reading than ever.

Fools. You cut your own throats.

(A PS for media monitoring services and self-Googlers who most need to read and reflect on the above: attention Mark Scott, Paul Ramadge, Angelo Frangopoulos, Jeremy Millar and David Koch.)

Posted via email from Garth's posterous

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