Coming In from Cold on Climate Change
Lost in translation: The politicization of science
A chart illustrating how various institutes funded by Exxon-Mobil provide money to politicians and others. (Credit – Greenpeace)
Politics and science have developed a terrible habit of colliding over the past decade, the worst part of which is that science almost always loses. Instead of being evaluated as a neutral source of knowledge and the basis for policy, science now often gets embraced, ignored or distorted, depending on the ramifications of its findings.
The latest reminder of this came recently when the media watchdog group Media Matters revealed that a top editor at Fox News, Bill Sammon, instructed reporters to question the legitimacy of climate change whenever reporting on that topic.
This, of course, is the official stance of the Republican Party, which Fox News makes no secret of supporting. Media Matters reported that Sammon’s sent the email to his staff in December 2009, as the United Nations climate change conference was getting underway in Copenhagen and the topic was appearing on its broadcasts.
“Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data…we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question,” Sammon wrote.
“It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies,” the message said.
Predictably, one of the first to respond with outrage was former Vice President Al Gore, who wrote on his blog that the news was “unsurprising, yet still disturbing, that Fox would allow its political bias to infiltrate its news reporting.
“Fox News has consistently delivered false and misleading information to its viewers about the climate crisis. The leaked emails now suggest that this bias comes directly from the executives responsible for their news coverage,” Gore wrote.
Gore’s response only further politicized the debate because Gore is a political figure – and a polarizing one – inserting even more political overtones into the climate change debate and obscuring the science behind it even further.
Sammons’ email was reportedly sent after a Fox News broadcast involved a report by the World Meteorological Association, a United Nations organization that said the years 2000 through 2009 would be the warmest in recorded history.
The data came from NASA, the National Climate Data Center and a joint record by Britain’s Met Office and the University of East Anglia, and said the planet had warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since record keeping began. Most of the warming occurred over the past 30 years.
The University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit was called into question by climate change skeptics after thousands of its emails were anonymously released online in October 2009. Eventually, journalists who evaluated the emails concluded that despite some unethical behavior by some scientists, no evidence of scientific fraud was found.
“The messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked,” the Associated Press wrote on Dec. 12, 2009, after an exhaustive review of the 1,073 emails by five reporters and numerous scientific experts.
By that time, however, science had already lost. Again.
Page: 1 2