Little Johnnie is heading out the door, a four year old demon whom God has seen fit to send your way. “Don’t play in the street,” you tell him. “Up yours!” he shouts, “I can if I want.” “No you can’t. You might get whacked by a car.” “You don’t know that,” he screams, beginning another horrid tantrum. “You don’t know that for sure. You can’t prove a thing.”

I’d suggest a clout alongside the head and send him to his room. What’s this you gotta prove something other than the possibility of danger? No, you can’t prove he’s gonna get whacked by a car on the street today, but there is a distinct possibility and the level of probability will increase every time the little rascal gets away from you. Some kids do get whacked by cars. Better they were whacked by their parents.

I saw Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. In it Al said that somebody had completed a survey of articles produced in academic and professional journals (peer review journals) on climate change. He said of the nearly one thousand articles surveyed not one, exactly and precisely zero, of those articles denied that climate change was occurring and that human activity was responsible. A comparable review of popular press — newspapers and magazines — found that over half of those articles tended to cast doubt on climate change. Note that the terminology is ‘doubt’, not negation. Okay, I said to myself, I’m going to watch that process.

A few days ago in the paper was an article in which the National Academy of Science gave tentative approval and support to a study which found that the last ten years have been the hottest of 400 years on record. The NAS gave a 67% approval rating to the study based on the insufficient quantity of temperature records to entirely prove it.

Al Gore was right. The contrary point of view was there. They said, (a) climate change wasn’t happening at all, and that (b) it’s cyclic. Same thing happened four hundred years ago and it wasn’t human activity then and things survived nicely, they said. The article was good enough to identify the contrarians. The Chairman of the Senate Environmental Committee is not a climatologist, nor are the two academics – one was a chemist working as an industrial consultant and the other an economist. If climatologists are unable to come up with accurate climatological information (What was the temperature in Cincinnati in 1606? Or Jakarta?), where did these guys find better? So, take your pick – who would know better, prominent scientists in the field or the other guys? Your choice.

“Not proven” is the expected wail of any industry which feels the heat of examination. What kind of an argument is that? Would you let it work in your house? They’d put you in jail of you let little Johnnie play on the freeway.

The popular media observe some sort of a “fairness” doctrine, in which they are very careful to present both points of view. What a minute – how true is that? All newspapers, at least dailies, carry an automotive section. In today’s paper is a puff piece on the Corvette. Was a contrarian point of view presented? Maybe an engineer from Ford or Toyata suggesting the Corvette sucked? No, no contrarians here.

I looked at the business section, home territory of economists. We’re having a grand grand summer. Every reason for optimism. Contrarian? Are you kidding? In the business section? Odd, might well have been, because the same day on the page one of the news section was an extensive report on the number of Americans that were turning belly buttons to the stars and floating to the surface. The double whammy of increases in costs of their ARMs coupled with the doubling of fuel prices done ‘em in. No contrary opinions noted in that article either.

How can the popular press and the academic press see things so differently? Well, if it looks like a duck…… there’s a difference that jumps right out at you. Advertising. Advertisers are solely responsible for the existence of commercial television in this country, and most certainly keep newspapers and magazines afloat. Your newspaper subscription handles the cost of distribution maybe, but advertisers provide the funds for production. A suggestion – perhaps demand? – from advertisers that a “fairness” policy be selectively applied would have to be entertained by the publishers of the popular press.

Permit me to make a distinction. I said publishers, I didn’t say journalists. Most of the material which I use in these columns was provided by journalists and I could scarcely express my appreciation to an adequate degree. A case in point is the OSU attempt to harvest energy from the waves of the sea. I shouldn’t have known of it but for my daily newspaper. And I commend that reporter for a job well done.

Publishers. All publishers are not created equal, not by a very wide margin. It would strain my vocabulary if I tried to express my disdain for some of them. Publishing is fundamentally an economic enterprise and you know what that can do to ethical standards. There are publishers good men and true, and I worship them. But they are not all like that. My home town paper appears to have all the integrity I could ask for. Still….the piece on the National Academy was there, wasn’t it?

Okay. Right off the bat is the realization that this is national news, not local. It will have been an offering from the wire services. The contrary view likely came along with the rest of the piece. I don’t admire speculation all that much, but in the absence of information it sometimes has to serve. Imagine a think tank or a group like the Swift Boat Veterans scanning the press on a daily basis, rating what they find, and publishing their findings to advertisers who wish to spend their money in places friendly to them. On that basis, might they advise publishes how to obtain a better rating? Speculation, but only partly. That’s how things are done.

Even with a valued publisher not all of the material contained in his publications ought to be taken at face value. The relationship between a publisher and his readers is a bit like a marriage. She/he may have his/her faults but it’s worth it. What’s a poor fella to do when you wish to test a publisher’s fidelity? Reading academic journals can get hairy. If it may please you to take a shot at it you might care to visit the place Al Gore suggested: www.climatechange.net. Try that and bang! You are visiting Stanford University, the American locus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There you will find (a) a series of reports (b) a bunch of multi-media presentations, and ©) links to other important sources on climate change. The report I copied out is the Third Assessment Report. A tidy little 800 (approximately) page report of where things climatic were in 2001, written by about 500 people (all scientists in a number of contributing disciplines), reviewed by another 500 people with impressive credentials, adopting suggested amendments as appropriate. I downloaded the thing, looked at the first few pages – there are fourteen discreet sections after that, each dealing with some facet of the problem If you read the “Summary for Policymakers” in the first twenty pages you will get an idea of what you’re in for and it’s not bad reading at all.

Dealing with the entire document would have to be, for a contrarian, something liking getting slapped in the face by a freight train moving at speed. Bear in mind that little opus was only one of several reports. If you’d like a hard copy of the TAR I’d suggest you buy one from Cambridge University Press, rather than trying to print the darned thing out.

So the opinions of an industry supported chemist, an economist, and a Senator wanna stand on the other end of the scale and try to balance it? Oh my goodness, that’s risible isn’t it?

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