By Paul Chesser on 10.16.08 @ 6:06AM
Selling carbon offset schemes, promoting enviro-Bibles, and
stressing extreme outcomes -- all business as usual for the
Society of Environmental Journalists.
The Society of
Environmental Journalists conducts its annual conference this
week in Roanoke, Va., and the best thing that can be said about
it is that this bunch won't be on the beat somewhere trying to
report something -- especially about global warming.
But then again these journalists couldn't call it that since the
planet's mean surface temperature
has not increased over the last eleven years. Instead they've
adopted the catchall identifier used by their fellow alarmism
activists: "climate change." It's all over SEJ's web page for
members, which they call "A guide to the information and
disinformation." This is allegedly where they tell their members
how to do a fair and balanced job.
Timothy Wheeler, president of SEJ and a reporter for the
Baltimore Sun, not long ago accused me of
slandering his organization's members (scroll down to comments)
because I called them objectivity-challenged. His defense:
There is no ideological litmus test to join SEJ; our members are
varied and independent. Your allegation that SEJ members do
unbalanced reporting links to the climate reporting guide posted
on our Web site at www.sej.org. That guide does advise reporters
to use care in evaluating skeptics' claims, and does discuss
funding of some.
However, if you care to look further, you will see that we also
advise reporters to beware of hype and exaggeration from
environmental groups, and to use similar care. And we include a
link to activistcash.com, which any reporter so inclined can
use to track the funding of environmental groups and others.
I decided to accept Wheeler's challenge and stroll through SEJ's
online guide to climate change reporting and see if it aligns
with his assertions. Won't you join me?
SEJ's "simple introductions" section
seems a good place to start. One of the half-dozen resources it
cites is the "Rough Guide to Climate Change," written by Robert
Henson. SEJ says Henson has "worked hard [I assume it saw the
sweat on his brow] to produce a complete, unbiased and
understandable approach to the subject."
But if you click on its link to this
resource, the advice is more "rough" than unbiased -- toward
humans, at least. "Climate change is a serious threat to the
ecosystems that humans rely upon," the Rough Guide website says,
"and air travel is the fastest-growing contributor to the
problem." Readers are therefore urged to buy carbon offsets
through Rough Guide's business partner, "Climate Care," which it
admits is a "carbon offsets scheme." Nothing inspires confidence
in balanced journalism like admonitions to buy sponsors'
products, does it?
THE NEXT EXHIBIT worthy of our attention is SEJ's assertion that
the 2001 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change is "the
Bible on climate science." If true, knowing the mainstream
media's understanding of
religion, then that would make it more of a Bible than the Bible
itself. In that light, we can compare statements of certainty
from God's Word such as Jesus' claim that "I am the Way, the
Truth, and the Life" to hedging such as
this from the IPCC report:
Ideally, internal climate variability would be estimated from
instrumental observations, but a number of problems make this
difficult. The instrumental record is short relative to the 30 to
50 year time-scales that are of interest for detection and
attribution of climate change, particularly for variables in the
free atmosphere.…the accuracy of this record is limited by
incomplete knowledge of the forcings and by the accuracy of the
climate model used to estimate the response.
Well, if the "Bible on climate science" said it, then I believe
it, and that settles it!
Let's sample one more resource from SEJ's online authority for
global warming reporters. How about the cage match between crisis
believers and the naysayers? Well, SEJ identifies the
alarm-sounders innocuously as "Environmentalist Groups," while
they call their opponents "Skeptics and Contrarians." Sort of
like the popular kids versus the geeks and freaks. SEJ also notes
financial and political affiliations of the few climate
dissenters they list, but fails to do so in descriptions of
environmentalist groups, who are well funded by large foundations
with left-wing socialist agendas.
Oh, SEJ does offer a offer a disclaimer
about fully trusting these eco-groups, here in part:
Some groups do a better job than others in acknowledging there
are still uncertainties about some of the science, but many -- in
the interests of prompting action -- tend to stress only the
most extreme outcomes [emphasis mine] among the range of
possible impacts.
This sounds familiar to me...oh yes, I remember where I've seen
this practice before -- in SEJ President Wheeler's
last article I read in the Baltimore Sun, where he
led with this:
Look for balmier winters and blistering summers in the decades to
come. Enjoy the colorful fall foliage in Western Maryland --
while you can. And unless circumstances change, prepare to see a
different mix of plants, trees and birds by the end of the
century, worsening dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay, and for the
state that some call "America in miniature" to get dramatically
smaller as rising waters push the shoreline inland. So says a
group of scientists who have compiled the first comprehensive
assessment of how Maryland could be altered by global climate
change….
Selling carbon offset schemes, promoting enviro-Bibles, and
stressing extreme outcomes: How could I ever question the
professionalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists and
their leader? Take your time in Roanoke, comrades -- no need to
hurry back.
topics:
Environment, Global Warming
