It had to happen and today the Associated Press has given the American public at large its first good look at a story that has been old news for weeks in countries where the media is more alert. The story, by Seth Borenstein doesn’t cover all the angles, but it does a very good job of introducing readers to the IPCC’s assorted problems. Thankfully, it neither tries to minimize (or sensationalize) the errors in the report, and it makes clear that concern about the sloppiness of some of the procedures at the IPCC isn’t restricted to hard core climate skeptics, but is found well within the ranks of IPCC writers and scientists.
There is more that will have to come out as the rest of the US media continues to catch up with British reporting, and as additional issues develop but we will likely now see the American press step up its climate game. Even Borenstein’s story doesn’t quite get the full measure of the problems: while the number of ‘proven’ errors in the IPCC report remains small, their impact is disproportionately large because the predictions were so high profile and so much a part of the public case as made by IPCC head Pachauri and even the UN Secretary General. More, the IPCC’s first (fatal) instinct was to malign and defame its critics rather than engage in serious discussions of the underlying evidence — discussions that soon would have demonstrated that in these cases at least the critics were right.
For those worried about global warming, the much delayed eruption of this story into the mainstream US press is the best thing that could happen. Denial is the enemy; the more you care about global warming the more you need to insist that the leaders of national and international scientific organizations charged with assessing the evidence and explaining it to the public stick to the highest, most rigorous standards of analysis. Increasing numbers of climate scientists are bringing themselves to say what is now more and more obvious: the leadership of the IPCC has failed this test. So has the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University. If serious environmentalists don’t join the campaign to clean up the IPCC they will be tainted by its errors.
For now, the Brits are still ahead. While the American press is still reporting the basic news, the (strongly environmentalist and center-left) Guardian is asking experts around the world how the IPCC can be fixed.
Hint to the American press: this, guys, is what journalism looks like.
Al Gore, so far as I can tell, is meanwhile remaining silent; I guess when truth is really, really inconvenient it’s better that way.