Global warming mountains and molehills

My first take on Andy Revkin's odd little story effectively equating the climate change "hyperbole" generated by Al Gore and George F. Will was a quick shrug. Now I am not so sure.

While making such a comparison is clearly out of line, it seemed to me that anyone reading the story would come away more impressed by the differences between how Gore and Will handled their errors, rather than any implied similarities. Gore immediately withdrew a problematic sequence from his slide show when it was pointed out that the described trend in weather-related damages was not linked exclusively to global warming. Will to this day refuses to accept that he misrepresented, either deliberately or out of ignorance, the science of climate change.

Regardless of some odd choice of wording from Revkin, I thought the overall effect was one in which Gore comes off looking like the responsible statesman, Will the stubborn child.

I seemed to be in the minority though. Joe Romm, for example, lay waste to another pair of gaskets this week in a two-part excoriation of Revkin for falling for the old false-equivalency game so beloved of climate science pseudoskeptics. Romm insists Gore is innocent of exaggerating any link between the weather-damage data and AGW. In a stretch of an argument reminiscent of Bill Clinton's "it depends on what you mean by 'is' " plea, he insists that Gore's non-specific use of the word "this" to describe the causes of said damage gives the former VP a pass.

Others, including me, are less willing to forgive Gore, in part because the same offending slides were included in the latest version of slide show supplied to The Climate Project volunteer presenters, and we weren't supplied with any guidance on how to describe the slides. It is a show about climate change, after all, and one has to be extremely careful before including dramatic charts and graphs that imply causation, regardless of what one says about it. You know what they say about television news: if the pictures and words conflict, the pictures win.

So, to recap: First, Revkin's story gives us enough details to conclude that while Gore may have exercised hasty judgment in the inclusion of a couple of slides, Will has a problem with reality and responsibility. Second, even if you grant Revkin overstated Gore's mistake, I can't share Romm's decision to give Gore a get-out-of jail-free card. It seemed to me that everyone was over-reacting. As Michael Tobis of the excellent, In it for the Gold blog commented at Romm's blog:

All this hair-splitting is beside the point. Even the worst possible interpretation of Gore's behavior is that he slightly overstated the position of the people gathering the data, was called on it, and reversed himself. It is hard to see this as newsworthy.

But we forget that one man's trivia is another's scandal. The inconvenient truth is, one of the world's most respected and widely circulated science journalists, whatever his intentions, failed to convey to many readers that there's an enormous difference between the way Gore deals with science and the way Will deals with it. Because of the inconvenient timing of the two cases, and the advantage Revkin took of the coincidence, Gore's molehill of an error somehow managed to get at least as much attention, if not more, than Will's ever-growing mountain.

So I am concluding the Revkin, for whom I still have great respect, should be more careful in the future. It's not just Revkin who's at fault, of course. Romm and others who have piled onto Revkin have only made matters worse by effectively doing the pseudoskeptics' dirty work and diverting attention away from the real story. Frak. Even I'm blogging about it (although I'm not going to wade into the debate over Roger Pielke Jr.'s role in the whole thing).

Every journalist, blogger and pundit should remember that it doesn't matter what you meant to say, only what is heard. And just so no one misinterprets what I'm trying to say about whose errors are the most troubling:

COMPARATIVE JUDGMENT FAILURE
George F. Will >> Andy Revkin > Al Gore

More like this

Is the reaction from Romm and others a little over the top? Clearly yes - his second article is very, very long, considering we are talking about the word 'this'.

On the other hand, was Revkin totally out of order in making out some sort of comparison between Will and Gore?
Damn right.

Revkin could have left Gore out of the article about Will - his mistake, if he made one, was minor, quickly corrected and totally accidental. Will was the story, but Revkin had to engage in the usual tactic of bring in someone from the reality/democratic/non-insane side of any story in order to provide 'balance'.

Will should and (will) remain the story, but every time a journalist engages in this kind of nonsensical 'balance' stuff, another denier smiles. Just as they get really happy when someone comes over all 'Nisbet' on us. Please don't. The only people distracting the story from Will is the NYT and the WaPo. Which is sad, since its their job to do the opposite.

There is another angle to this ... within minutes of Andy's article being published, I had the first email into my box about "Gore lies" and "Gore is making it up". Before I'd had a chance to actually read the article, I'd had tens of emails to various discussion groups / listserves that I monitor crowing about Gore's deception. I've had people ask me about this, having heard that the New York Times reported that Gore was making things up.

For an open reader, with some background in hand, it was easy to get past the 'he says, she says' structure of the article. This is not true of a good share of readers. And, well, it provided 'ammo' for the gristmill of skeptics.

Yes, Gore withdrew one slide of 400 after hearing from the people whose work he was using (and having a basis, called NY Times reporting, for using the slide exactly how he used it).

And, yes, George F Will is a serial distorter, who turns people's "Yeses" into "Nos" through cherry-picked quotes and is otherwise so creative that any fact coming from him is unlikely to be truthful, even if true.

So, why the balance? Revkin blew this one bigtime ... he (along with others) is wiling to give far more slack to Will (what do you expect) than to Gore and other climate realists.

> within minutes of Andy's article being published,
> I had the first email ... Before I'd had a chance
> to actually read the article, I'd had tens of emails
> to various discussion groups / listserves that I monitor
> crowing about Gore's deception.

Now there's your real story, if you pull this kind of material together for a variety of sites.

Check the origin, and the original timestamps. Check the claimed sender name(s).

How many of these people live together and send their email fractions of a second apart from the same computer?

How many of them are secondary and tertiary copies of first versions?

By Hank Roberts (not verified) on 06 Mar 2009 #permalink