Media Matters:
On April 29, former Wall Street Journal columnist and longtime climate denier Bret Stephens published his first column, “Climate of Complete Certainty,” for The New York Times. The column was roundly criticized for being full of errors, “unfair comparisons,” “straw men,” “logical fallacies,” and “lazy” and “disingenuous” arguments. Notably, in the one instance where Stephens actually quoted data to make an assertion, the Times was forced to issue a correction, clarifying, “An earlier version of this article misstated the area that warmed by 0.85 degrees Celsius as noted in the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel report. It was the globally averaged combined land and ocean surface, not only the Northern Hemisphere.”
Now climate experts have issued an open letter calling for the Times to publish a more substantial correction. It notes that Stephens inaccurately and misleadingly uses the term “modest” to describe the rise in temperatures since 1880, cherry-picks “only one side of the range of uncertainties” associated with climate projections, and “mischaracterizes both the certainties and uncertainties regarding climate change, and misrepresents how science reports uncertainties.”
The letter also invites scientists to add their names to the letter and urges concerned members of the public to sign a petition calling on the Times to stop publishing climate science misinformation.
The Times has continued to vigorously defend their new columnist. While
the paper’s public editor groused that one email, from a climate scientist, “went on for many paragraphs challenging Stephen’s ‘fallacious and misleading argument,’” that public editor did not mention whether the paragraphs contained valid factual corrections of Stephen’s error-riddled piece, instead declaring that the paper’s readers “face the serious test of whether they can show tolerance for views they don’t like.”
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—NYT: 1990 law limits BP's damage liability to $75 million:
According to Wald's report, there have been 51 instances in which damages under the $75 million liability cap has been exceeded. That figure will certainly be exceeded with BP's Deepwater Horizon spill. Up to $1 billion from the fund can be used for any single accident, but in this case, $1 billion is likely to be peanuts.
In other words, it was a pretty sweet deal for oil companies: they agreed to a tiny tax which they can pass on to consumers, and in exchange their liability is limited to $75 million. Because they can pass the oil tax along to consumers, it's like they got the liability caps for free.
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show,
Greg Dworkin,
Joan McCarter, and
Andrew Jackson carry us through the morning, and the Civil War. Updates on Trumpcare 3.1 & the CR. Republicans gleefully step up to play scumbag role, pushing back on Jimmy Kimmel’s disgusting socialist baby.