GLOBAL WARMING: UNGRATEFUL GREENS BEAT UP ON THE NEW YORK TIMES

San Diego Union Tribune, 16 March 2007

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Chris Reed 

On Tuesday, The New York Times carried a story that could signal a turn in the

global warming debate. It said that many scientists believed that Al Gore and

his allies were guilty of exaggerations and overstatements. 

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming,

"An Inconvenient Truth," which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do

many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who

laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog

entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last

year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points are

exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his

alarmism.

"I don't want to pick on Al Gore," Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of

geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual

meeting of the Geological Society of America. "But there are a lot of

inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with

real data."

When I made similar points a month or two ago, I received incensed e-mails

telling me I was a fool. So I was sure The New York Times would find itself

under fire from political (as opposed to scientific) environmentalists. 

Sure enough, the executive director of the Sierra Club is peeved at the NYT for

going off-message. Incredibly enough, a New Republic pundit compared the NYT to

National Review, home to the world's loudest global warming skeptics.

What a churlish bunch. They got upset with the New York Times for running one

skeptical article under the fold on the cover of the weekly Science section and

forget about the 318 stories that have mentioned global warming on the NYT's

front page -- few of which did anything to throw water on the contentions of

political environmentalists that global warming is the moral/political/scientific crisis of modern times.

318 to one, and they're not satisfied.

How did I come up with the 318 figure? I did an open-ended Nexis search for New

York Times articles mentioning global warming that appeared in Section A on Pg.

1 or Page 1.