Pictures of the year: funnies - Telegraph

A researcher adjusts a plastic tank on the back of a cow, in attempt to capture its gases for global warming research, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, July 4, 2008

Journalists complain about all those stupid, emotional, Rush-Limbaugh-listening "deniers"

In an e-mail interview with The Yale Forum, Beeman, a former president of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), allowed that the reactions usually aren’t very pretty.

“Whenever I cover the climate change issue, the reader comments attached to my Web story tend to be mostly from people who do not believe climate change is happening,” he wrote. “I have yet to see any cite a peer-reviewed, objective scientific study to support the contrarian view.” (Also see Yale Forum article, Plain Dealer Reporter Michael Scott Explores Cleveland’s Broadcast Met Attitudes, for another example of a story’s generating extensive and highly vocal reader response.

Among beat reporters, hard-hitting denial from often anonymous readers is a common point of frustration that’s vented the way waiters might complain about bad-tipping tourists. It’s an emotional dimension that doesn’t always factor its way - with some exceptions - into those specialty climate change blogs and sites that attract mostly science junkies and enviro insiders.

The denial rhetoric continues even as belief in man-made climate change is [allegedly] growing over time in the U.S.
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National Public Radio’s science reporter Richard Harris says his audience might tend to deliver “more sophisticated responses” than perhaps consumers of other general distribution media do. (Comments are attached to his stories at npr.org.) He sometimes hears from the environmental crowd that he’s “not being panicky enough.”

But Harris too still sees his share of sharp denial and criticism. “There are some people who have read a Michael Crichton novel or listened to Rush Limbaugh or gotten it into their head that there’s some type of conspiracy,” he said in a phone interview with The Yale Forum.

Harris said climate “skeptics” reacting to his on-air reporting often portray uncertainty as going only one way: that scientific doubt about the pace of climate change inevitably means it’s not going to happen, as opposed to its also leaving open the prospect that things may get worse than currently projected.

“I haven’t pointed out people’s logical fallacies,” he said, “… though I’m sorely tempted to do that.”

The pattern of response to climate change stories generally is hard to quantify. And it’s tough to know exactly how much of the hard-core denial in the Web traffic is the same old set of people, perhaps making sport of hectoring the resident environmental journalist and keeping him or her “honest,” as it were.