Media Dupes on Climate Change

Life would be a lot better if we did not believe that scientific fact is determined by majority vote. And yet, we live in the world we live in.

When 500 scientists wrote to the United Nations in order to argue that the climate crisis is not real, climate change activists challenged the credentials of some of them. Some of them were just plain ordinary scientists. Some were retired-- which apparently makes their views invalid. Few were actually involved in research into meteorology.

Of course, the name of Richard Lindzen was prominently displayed. And Lindzen is a distinguished meteorologist, formerly he headed up the climate science lab at MIT. If Lindzen thinks that the crisis is overblown, the chances are very good that it’s overblown.

Besides, who would you trust, one of the nation’s leading climate scientists or a Swedish schoolgirl? Let’s imagine that some of the signatories were physicists. Do you think that a reputable physicist knows more or less about scientific research than does a Swedish schoolgirl?

Anyway, the climate change consortium was rattled by the letter. So it has trotted out its own manifesto, sporting 11,000 signatories, declaring that the climate apocalypse is nigh. What could possibly be wrong with that?

Powerline has collected some of the Twitter reports, all of which embrace the findings of the 11,000.

And yet, it turns out that the group does not really contain very many climate scientists. And that the letter does not represent scientific opinion.

Powerline reports:

Actually, there was no study, there was just a press release. And it wasn’t 11,000 scientists, it was 11,000 random people who put their names on a web page. But today’s reporters are so biased and so incompetent that when it comes to “climate change,” they will swallow anything.

It’s a sad day when the mainstream American media becomes a propaganda organ for the radical left.