My Favorite Climategate 2.0 Email (so far)
I am working on a summary post of the new batch of climategate emails, but this is perhaps my favorite. It is written to Andy Revkin, nominally a reporter for the NY Times but revealed by the new emails to be pretty much the unpaid PR agent of Michael Mann and company. Over and over, emails from Mann and his cohorts get Revkin to write the articles they want, drop quotes from skeptics from articles, and in general coordinate communications policy.
Anyway, one climate scientist writes Revkin this note
I think the notion of telling the public to prepare for both global warming and an ice age at the same [time] creates a real public relations problem for us.
Amazing that this actually had to be said.
Update: Revkin is currently an opinion blogger but at the time of the emails he was supposed to be a news reporter at the NYT.
marco73:
The recent emails are pretty devastating, but "climate change" has now become a punchline.
This morning on the local news, the weather girl was talking about how the number of named Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes this season was "the third most since NOAA has been keeping records." She was trying to push her segment about how hurricane season ends on Wednesday.
My feeble brain poked 2 big holes in her story before coffee time:
We've only been naming storms since the 1950's, so the sample size is pretty small.
We've also gotten a whole lot better detecting storms.
There were quite a few tropical storms this season that were way out to sea, and died out before even sniffing land. Before satellites, we would have never even known the storms were there.
The weather girl pressed on, trying to earnestly make some sort of correlation of our busy hurricane season to "climate change."
The 2 news anchors, and the traffic girl, starting laughing at the "climate change" line. The poor weather girl couldn't even finish her segment, feebly ending with something about how devastating hurricane Irene was this year.
I certainly believe that the news media has moved on from global warming and climate change. Now if politicians would just take a clue from the media, and move on to something else.
November 29, 2011, 2:18 pmRandomReal[]:
The dog that didn't bark --
The first release mostly involved emails between climate "scientists" (scare quotes intended). In the second release, the same crew is back, but the emails extend to NGOs and journalists, such as Revkin. What lies behind the encryption? My WAG is that there are emails to politicians.
Looking forward to your summary post.
November 29, 2011, 3:53 pmcwon14:
Really, there are no reporters left at the NYTimes for decades now. They are all op-ed writers with usually just one overriding political agenda at or below the surface.
November 29, 2011, 6:33 pmHugh K:
@ marco73 - I certainly believe that the news media has moved on from global warming and climate change.
One can only hope. The media's support for the pop-culture save the planet crusaders was wide and deep. NBC would very much like us to forget how the AGW scam even invaded Sunday Night Football, shutting off the lights during the half-time show. Or Matt Lauer of NBC's Today Show conveniently touting "experts" like algore in their coverage of climate change while on yet another large carbon footprint excursion to some supposedly 'highly-threatened' location simply to read a teleprompter.
November 30, 2011, 9:17 amQED:
Revkin is the NYT's new Walter Duranty - the 'uselful idiot' used by the Soviets to peddle their propaganda. It's nice to know the NYT hasn't really changes its stripes. They are still bright red.
November 30, 2011, 9:45 am