Politico published a science story by Erika Lovley so bad that, well, there is no legitimate reason to post directly to it directly as opposed to Joe Romm with New media same as the old media. Politico pimps global cooling for Hill deniers, David Roberts with Politico’s journalist malpractice, The Way Things Break with “Scientists” and the media (a far too mild title for the circumstances), Steve Benen on “The Gore Effect”, and Brad Johnson with Politico’s Erika Lovley Promotes Toxic Stupity About Global Warming. If you have the stomach for it, you can get to Lovley’s display of scientific ignorance through these posts. But, first, don’t those titles start to give you a taste for just how bad a job she did with this piece?
In short, Lovley lovingly lays a case for imaginery concerns about whether global warming is really something to be concerned about, that there is a
“growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings that could signal that the science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation.”
Hmmm, might be worthy to actually cite in the discussion reputable climate scientists, no? However, that seemed beyond Erika’s rolodex with the dominant stream being global warming denier after denier. As Brad Johnson put it,
Lovley unquestioningly quotes extremist denier Joseph D’Aleo, Sen. Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) aide Marc Morano, and Cato Institute fellow Patrick Michaels in a piece littered with bald assertions and slanders against the scientific community without any basis in reality.
Reality, it is hard to see the basis for this article. Perhaps we should simply count Erika’s works as not science writing, but science fiction. But, in that case it would be an insult to the vast mass of science fiction writers who have some association with reality and real facts somewhere in their work. This travesty of an excuse for journalism is truly difficult to explain. Payments from the right-wind sound machine or the fossil-fuel industry? A job application with Senator Inhofe (R-EXXON)? Perhaps a writing sample for The Onion?
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1 Fool me once … | Biofuels Brazil // Dec 4, 2008 at 11:41 pm
[…] Earlier this week, Politico, the influential Beltway newspaper, ran an awful story on climate change skeptics (two, actually). I kind of, um, flipped out, and Politico got bashed by Joe Romm, Brad Johnson, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Steve Benen, Curtis Brainard, and Adam Siegel. […]