Have you ever noticed a bias against climate change science
in many of Canada’s newspapers? I’ll
give you a great example I saw recently in the Edmonton Sun in a column by its
notorious right-wing columnist Lorne Gunter. In an article titled “CLIMATE
CHANGE ALARMISTS: Cherry-picking facts about weather extremes to make their
climate danger arguments”, Gunter of course makes much of the fact that there
was more snow on March 3 than there had been in 25 years, followed by the
coldest March 4 in 22 years.
Then there is a deceptive flash of intelligence:
“Fine, I know, weather is not climate. But…when weather extremes fit the
alarmists’ climate-change theory, we’re told it proves the environmental
science is settled. But when the weather doesn’t reinforce their panicky
message, it’s dismissed as meaningless.” [ Unfortunately, however, the
inconvenient truth is that the past couple of harsher-than-usual winters actually
do
fit the theory. Warmer air being funneled to the poles by the Earth’s
convection currents has caused sea ice to melt that had previously been holding
the polar vortex in place. As a result, the vortex has weakened and drifted
south, yielding longer, harsher winters for most of North America.] Then Gunter lets loose an unsubstantiated
whopper: “For decades now, the sun’s activity has been on the increase. Solar
scientists predict it will now lessen for a couple (or three) decades. And as
it lessens, global temperatures should fall , too. ..We can shut every coal plant
on earth, ban SUVs and force everyone to ride transit, and it will have
negligible impact on climate.”
Here is the funny part: on the opposing page is an
article by PostMedia’s science writer Hina Alam, in which she interviews Katherine Hayhoe,
director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, stating that
the sun’s energy has been measured very accurately for about 4 decades now, and
that its energy has been going down over the last few decades, once
you control for the 11-year sunspot cycle: the precise opposite of what Gunter
asserts. “So if we are being controlled by the sun’s energy right now, we
should have been getting cooler, not warmer.”
Her facts are easily corroborated by NASA and university scientists. “Humans are controlling the climate, and that
means that our choices will determine our future.”
Now, here is the more subtle and insidious part: if
you were to complain to the Editors of the Sun about Gunter’s error (prevarication?),
they would point out that it was they who placed Alam’s report on the same page
as Gunter’s column, and the interview with Hayhoe on the opposing page. Gunter
is an opinion columnist and is therefore entitled to his opinion, and they also
made the opposing opinion about climate change available to their readers, who
could then make up their own minds.
What’s wrong with that? Well, here’s
what’s wrong with that: providing equal space to two different scientific “truths”--flat
and round Earth, evolution and creation, sunlight falling or increasing,--- is not the same thing as providing a balance
of opinion. Accurate measurements and scientific consensus should provide the
common basis upon which reasonable
discussion and difference of opinion takes place, so that truth can be advanced.
Instead, we get a complete relativization of truth itself--the kind of “fair
and balanced” journalism more worthy of
Fox Television than a respectable Canadian news outlet. Would the same media relativize objective facts congenial to the right-wing point of view in this fashion? We should ask: who are the real cherry-pickers, and how are they operating?
