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The Post gets one right;

the Globe chooses cowardice over context

Two recent newspaper pieces throw a peculiarly Canadian slant on the scandalously unprofessional job that many in mainstream media have been doing in covering climate change.

The most shocking - and wonderful - contribution came last week from the National Post, the home of some of Canada’s silliest and most beligerent climate change deniers, including Terence Corcoran, Peter Foster, Lawrence Solomon and Rex Murphy. In an excellent critique of blindly ideological climate change denial, Post Comment Pages Editor Jonathan Kay says flatly that, Global-warming deniers are a liability to the conservative cause. Kay then dismantles several laughable positions championed by journalists he does not name - but whom he will now have to avoid in the Post lunchroom.

The second article appeared last Saturday in the Globe, under the heading: The Endless Summer. Noting that it’s “the hottest year in recorded history, the Globe offers 659 mostly well-researched words on the details of our planetary fever without once mentioning the phrases “climate change” or “global warming.” At one point, the writers, Anna Mehler Paperny and Patrick White, say, “International climate experts are at a loss to explain why these local phenomena are happening all at once.”

Really?

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Suit Could Hold Paper Responsible for Comments and Internet Repetitions

Dr. Andrew Weaver, one of the most respected climate scientists in Canada and one of the best climate modellers in the world, has launched a libel suit against the National Post newspaper and its publisher, editors and three writer: Terence Corcoran, Peter Foster and Kevin Libin.

In the words of a news release broadcast today, the suit is for “a series of unjustified libels based on grossly irresponsible falsehoods that have gone viral on the Internet.”

The 48-page Statement of Claim (download the PDF version here) sets out a National Post  pattern of reporting critical and erroneous material about Weaver and, in recent times, refusing to retract or correct when inaccuracies are brought to the paper’s attention. An obvious example was an allegation that Weaver had (or was about to) quit his Nobel-winning role in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - an allegation Weaver dismissed out of hand.

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In a wonderfully silly update of the (Canadian newspaper the) National Post’s campaign of climate change denial, columnist Lorne Gunther (picked up here in the Edmonton Journal) argues that global warming has ended - and to prove it, he imagines the earth as an out-of-control Toyota which he decides has run out of gas.

What good fortune that might be (running out of gas in time to stop before you hit the cliff). But how can we think that our careering planetary heating system - which appears to have it its top speed and has been holding steady for more than a decade - is “out of gas” when we’re pumping the stuff into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate?

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In her on-air dismemberment of the disingenuous National Post columnist Lawrence Solomon last week, Anna Maria Tremonti, host of the CBC radio show, The Current, asked Solomon this:

“In your book (The Deniers), you write that the scientist you talk about are not actually deniers, that most of them quibble with some of the details but not with the fundamental question of whether climate change is happening or whether it is caused by human activity. Do I have that right?”

Solomon responded: “No, you don’t have that right at all.”

Yet, on Page 45 of his book, Solomon says: “”As these dramatic reversals for the doomsday view mounted, I noticed something striking about my growing cast of deniers.

“None of them were deniers.”

Solomon then spends a page going over quibbles and concludes that the people in his book are “Affirmers in general. Deniers in particular.”

Which is to say that Tremonti had it absolutely right, regardless of Solomon’s willingness - against evidence committed by his own hand - to try to say otherwise.

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Climate Change itself, however, is as bad as ever

The National Post’s Denier-in-Chief Lawrence Solomon has weighed in again with an irrelevant and inaccurate celebration that, in the U.S. at least, people are becoming LESS concerned about climate change.

Of course, Solomon didn’t offer any actual evidence for this contention, other than vague references to unspecified public opinion polls. His strongest source was this: “Andrew Revkin, The New York Times reporter entrusted with the global warming scare beat, has for months lamented “the public’s waning interest in global warming.”

As for actual climate change science - apparently of little interest to Solomon or his readers - he offered no sources whatever. Instead, he repeated the denier talking points (“Not only has the globe not warmed over the last decade but the Arctic ice is returning, the Antarctic isn’t shrinking, polar bear populations aren’t diminishing, hurricanes aren’t becoming more extreme.”), ignoring such actual evidence as the new Nature article warning that Antarctic ice is, in fact, declining at historic rates, or the latest warning from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.