How the Denial Lobby and a Dishonest Journalist Created a Fake Scandal
Tim Holmes has an excellent in-depth look at the manufacturing of one of the latest phony scandals in the recent deluge of anti-AGW propaganda: the claim that the IPCC AR4 made “false predictions” about the Amazon rain forest: “AmazonGate”: how the denial lobby and a dishonest journalist created a fake scandal.
This latest feeding frenzy kicked off when one erroneous claim – that Himalayan glaciers were “very likely” to disappear by 2035 – was found to have slipped through the net, the IPCC’s extensive review process having failed to weed it out prior to publication. The claim was included on page 493 of the IPCC’s second 1000-page Working Group report on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” (WGII). The reference given was to a WWF report – part of the non-peer-reviewed “grey literature” that makes up a periphery of the material in the second Working Group’s report.
Marginal as it may have been, for the media this isolated error appears to have opened the floodgates. A hysterical flurry of activity followed, as the denial lobby began trawling through the IPCC report for anything else that might look bad – particularly anything referencing the grey literature. The results of this search were then fed to elements of the press, who eagerly snatched them up – uncritically repeating many of their claims in the process.
Blogger Richard North was the originator of one such story. North is a climate change denier who has worked with the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker on a number of publications, including most recently Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth. In the words of sceptical writer Richard Wilson, the book is a “surrealist masterpiece”, claiming to debunk “the dangers of passive smoking, white asbestos, eating BSE-infected beef, CO2 emissions, leaded petrol, dioxins, and high-speed car driving”. Examining the book’s commentary on climate change, one atmosphere physicist noted that its “references are very selective and misrepresentative”; another concluded: “[t]hese people have added two and two and got five”. The book misrepresents and even reverses the findings of published scientific literature, and includes a fabricated interview with a Cambridge astrophysicist that had long since been retracted. As the Guardian’s Robin McKie puts it in his review of the book, Booker and North “accuse other journalists of ‘unthinking credulity’ but commit egregious errors that would shame a junior reporter.”
Christopher Booker, North’s co-writer on the book, has himself claimed that white asbestos is “chemically identical to talcum powder”, receiving repeated condemnations from the UK’s Health and Safety Executive for his “misinformed” and “substantially misleading” articles on the subject. He has also denied the link between passive smoking and lung cancer, between BSE and CJD in humans, and, astonishingly, claimed that proponents of Darwinian evolutionary theory “rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions”.
One might have expected such corners of crankery to be passed over by most mainstream journalists, or at least left to fester on the Telegraph’s comment pages. But these sources are not only being read – they are finding their “research” used as the foundation for major news stories.
