The level of coverage in America regarding questions raised by the Climategate scandal and other related revelations is a scandal. The Euro-media has been on the story from the beginning and surprisingly, is telling the story in a mostly objective manner.
Spiegel Online has an exhaustive, 8-page review of events and discoveries since the Climategate emails were revealed. It shows a climate science community in near chaos and dispirited over the fact that so much data was fabricated or deliberately ignored.
The Climategate affair is grist for the mills of skeptics, who have gained growing support for their cause, particularly in English-speaking countries. What began with hacked emails in the United Kingdom has mushroomed into a crisis affecting an entire scientific discipline. At its center is an elite and highly influential scientific group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).Working on behalf of the United Nations, the scientists organized under IPCC's umbrella -- including Phil Jones -- regularly prepare prognoses on the Earth's looming greenhouse climate. Without the IPCC reports, governments would not be embroiled in such passionate debate about phasing out the age of oil and coal.
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Since then, the IPCC has experienced a dramatic fall from grace. Less than three years after this triumph, more and more mistakes, evidence of sloppy work and exaggerations in the current IPCC report are appearing. They include Jones' disputed temperature curve, the prediction that all Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 -- which was the result of a simple transposition of numbers -- and the supposed increase in natural disasters, for which no source was given.In mid-March, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon slammed on the brakes and appointed a watchdog for the IPCC. The InterAcademy Council, a coalition of 15 national academies of science, will review the work of the IPCC by this fall.
There is already a consensus today that deep-seated reforms are needed at the IPCC. The selection of its authors and reviewers was not sufficiently nonpartisan, there was not enough communication among the working groups, and there were no mechanisms on how to handle errors.
This is a big departure for German media who have been one of the strongest advocates over the years for action by governments to head off climate change. The idea that a leading publication would devote so much space to explaining why Climategate is so important is a good sign that skepticism is making some headway - at least overseas.
Meanwhile, mainstream media and general audience science publications in the US continue to treat climategate as a blip on the radar, not worth covering. Even when emails surface proving that NASA has based its temperature data on faulty readings, there is barely a whisper at the New York Times or elsewhere.
If cap and trade is to be headed off, skepticism regarding the need for it must penetrate the voter's minds. Even with the near blackout, Americans are becoming more skeptical of global warming but it's not good enough. The case must be presented fairly with both sides getting a hearing.
That won't happen unless the mainstream media in America starts covering the story the way it should be.
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