The New York Times’s lead climate activist/reporter (The Times clearly doesn’t make a distinction) Andrew Revkin’s blog – Dot Earth – is a revealing diary of a journalist as environmentalist. Like his correspondence for The Times (most recently from Bali last week), Revkin’s blog is indistinguishable from Green weblogs.
He talks only to green sources, only cites studies that conform with GW orthodoxy, and hangs on The Goracle’s every word.
His rare references to GW dissenters are to dismiss their credibility as he did in a December 14 post, “Media Mania for a ‘Front-Page Thought’ on Climate,” in which he yawns at Roger Pielke Jr.’s critique of media coverage that ignores a Nature study finding no global warming link to hurricanes while giving saturation coverage to a less-prominent journal’s study suggesting global warming has a significant effect on hurricanes.
Revkin shrugs off any suggestion the 26-1 story ratio is a result of of ideological bias. The disparity, he says, is because the media “crave conflict.” The Nature article, he patiently explains to us naifs who expect news media to cover news, “was about agreement. A snooze.”
By this logic, then, Revkin and his colleagues should have craved the drama that surrounded the Bali conference last week:
– The U.N. shutting down news conferences by contrarian scientists.
– More than 100 scientists, including prominent names like Dyson, Lindzen and Bryson, signing a letter to the U.N. Secretary General arguing that Bali “is taking the world in entirely the wrong direction.”
– That global average temperature statistics used by the IPCC show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998.
– That (as Chris Horner points out below) U.S. CO2 emissions have been increasing at a slower rate than the very European countries that were booing and hissing the U.S in Bali.
Of course, these news stories were ignored by The New York Times and most major news outlets. So much for Mr. Revkin’s “conflict” theory.