A couple of posts back I observed that though climate change denial is still a regular feature of the media, it tends to have been relegated these days to the ‘opinion’ section of the newspapers, rather than counting as ‘news’. It just goes to show I really haven’t been paying attention. So here’s an apology. I was wrong: denial of evidence for anthropogenic climate change is very much being reported as news. Today’s Australian newspaper, for instance, has a piece by John Stapleton entitled ‘Cold snap fails to cool protagonists of global warming’
As it happens there are dozens of recent examples of climate change scepticism being presented either as one side of a balanced argument that has yet to be concluded, or else as the beleaguered voice of reason, remorselessly shouted down by climate change fanatics. The Australian piece falls into the latter category, as it reports media coverage of climate change as ‘hysterical’ and ‘getting worse’, ‘with a large public relations effort inundating the media with information from the alarmist side.’
Tim Lambert of UNSW has been cataloguing the ones he’s noticed, and is up to 24 from the Australian newspaper alone. He claims this amounts to a ‘war against science’. Is that right? Is it a war, and is science the true target?
Four Cultures 