The Right Wing Noise Machine vs Climate Science. Again

From today's Tribune-Review:

The New York Times went full-tilt boogie in its front-page coverage of “legions of demonstrators frustrated by international inaction on global warming” descending on the Big Apple on Sunday, even devoting eight photos to the rally.

And that would be a legion of over 310,000, by the way.

A march that the Trib has decided not to cover, by the way, though it did post this piece from USAToday:

The one-day [UN] summit, preceded by a historic march that drew tens of thousands of climate activists to Manhattan streets on Sunday, occurs as scientists report that global greenhouse gas emissions rose 2.3 percent last year to record levels. In the United States, despite several recent years of decline, they rose 2.9 percent.

So while that's in the Trib, they editorialize with this:

As Steven Koonin, a former Obama administration undersecretary for science in the Energy Department, offered in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, “there isn't a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing the human influence” on climate.

Yea, they also left out that Koonin at least as late as 2007 was the "Chief Scientist" for British Petroleum.

Gee, they put in that he was an undersecretary for Science under the Obama administration but left out that he was a Chief Scientist for British Petroleum.  I wonder why.

And they're still trying to play the "no consensus" card?  Why?  From BillMoyers.com:

The most important thing to understand about the scientific consensus that human activities are causing the earth to warm is that it isn’t a result of peer pressure or someone policing scientists’ opinions. It results from the scientific method.

“Scientists are very interested in theories that other factors may be causing climate change,” says John Abraham. “The contrarians put forward ideas and the consensus scientists investigate them honestly and find that they don’t withstand scientific scrutiny. This happens all the time. That’s how science works. In fact, showing that these guys are wrong makes the science better.”

A scientific consensus emerges when the weight of evidence for a proposition becomes so great that serious researchers stop arguing about it among themselves. They then move on to study and debate other questions. There’s quite a bit of scientific debate about lots of different aspects of climate change, but the question of whether humans are causing the planet to warm isn’t one of them.

There have been three studies, using different methodologies, that have shown that almost all working climate scientists — 97 percent — accept the consensus view.

So simply saying "no consensus" doesn't really mean there's no consensus.

But we already knew that.