The American Spectator

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Media Matters

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To explain, he draws a bell curve on a large notepad and uses that curve to represent scientific debate. Every idea starts out as a big, sloppy curve, with people arguing violently on both sides. The curve narrows, or "spikes," over time as more evidence comes in most people migrate in from the margins to the center.

Revkin says that in the global warming debate, there isn't just one curve. Some things are far less contested than others, but there's still an awful lot of debate. Rightly so. There's much that we still don't know about how the climate works.

Likewise, many so-called global warming skeptics agree on those issues where scientific opinion has spiked. Revkin points out that MIT's Richard Lindzen agrees that manmade global warming is a real issue. And "even Pat Michaels" predicts that we'll have about three degrees of warming over the next hundred years, which Revkin reminds us, "is well within the IPCC estimates."

When new findings are offered, he says, the tendency of journalists has been to seize on "every one of those little punctuation marks and make it into God's truth." However, the plural of anecdote is not data.

"[T]he mousetrap is all ready for us to screw up," Revkin warns the audience. It is "very important" for good environmental journalists to also be global warming skeptics of a sort. If they want readers to take them seriously, they should report on the clashes and conflicts that make science so entertaining.

topics:
Bill Clinton, Television, Environment, Global Warming, NATO, North Korea, Oil