Posted by Damozel | At the science blog Deltoid, blogger Tim Lambert challenges the report that Gore's views on climate change have somehow been discredited by a British high court judge or indeed that the judge found nine errors. As we explain in our own piece, the man who attempted to get An Inconvenient Truth banned from British schools argued that it contained nine errors, but the BBC and other papers don't seem to have read the judge's conclusions sufficiently closely. Lambert---whose piece I just found via Memeorandum--- goes after the misreporting of this decision and the consequent media misrepresentations. In his initial piece, he alleges:
Unfortunately a gaggle of useless journalists have misreported this decision as one that AIT contained nine scientific errors. Let me name some of the journalists who got it wrong: Sally Peck in the Daily Telegraph, Nico Hines in the Times, Mike Nizza in the New York Times, James McIntyre in the Independent, PA in Melbourne's Herald Sun, David Adam in the Guardian, Daniel Cressey in Nature, the BBC, Mary Jordan in the Washington Post, Marcus Baram for ABC News, and (of course) Matthew Warren in the Australian.(Deltoid)
Quoting directly from the opinion of Mr Justice Burton,
he puts the "nine errors" meme squarely in context. In addition, he does what the 'gaggle' did not and challenges Mr Justice Burton's findings and conclusions.(Deltoid) His subsequent article, "The Washington Post's War on Gore" (which I found through Memeorandum) contains an excellent and crucial round-up of challenges to The Washington Post's coverage. Embittered bloggers and climate change skeptics who want to piss vitriol on Gore's prize based on media reports of the so-called nine so-called 'errors' had best read Lambert's two articles first and Memeorandum's round up first. (And--just to be fair to WaPo---they also might want to read this editorial.)
Weird. It's exactly as if the journalists who reported this case, and especially whoever who wrote the headlines, simply echoed one another without really delving into the underlying facts or bothering to separate allegations from conclusions. Surely not?
And, as Lambert pointed out, not one seems to have questioned whether Mr Justice Burton's conclusions were in fact scientifically correct. He's a judge. He has to decide based on the question before him and the evidence he is asked to review. To see Lambert's analysis of his findings, see his article, An 'error' is not the same thing as an error
In other words: not exactly a slam dunk for global warming skeptics. In our previous BN-Politics posting, we respond in much more detail to Gore's critics:
A Response to the Critics Acid Raining on Gore's Parade
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