Bill Sammon, the Washington managing editor and vice president of Fox News, has dictated the groundrules for reporters covering issues of climate change. As Media Matters notes, Sammon broadcast an email outlining ideological parameters for climate reporting – a mere 15 minutes after Fox News correspondent Wendell Goler reported from Copenhagen that the World Meteorological Organization found the last decade is “expected to turn out to be the warmest decade on record”, conflicting with Fox’s preferred “Climate Gate” narrative. Goler noted that temperature data from primary research groups across the planet are consistent, and show similar warming trends.
The story is showing up among the climate bloggers as one would expect. The question is whether the mainstream press will pick up on the idea that there is a pretender among them, that claims to be a news source, but is in fact merely a mouthpiece for the republican party, and it’s most powerful contributors – the fossil fuel industry.
Quick googling at this hour shows only a Politico story, and a note from a blogspace at the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Readers are invited to let me know if this finds it’s way into your favorite mainstream media.
Update: The Guardian has now published an account.
Tech News World has it.
Quote:
Sammon’s assertion in his email that there is some question that the planet is warming was challenged by experts interviewed by TechNewsWorld. “I don’t know of any scientist who would say that the planet is not warming,” declared John Abraham, an associate professor of engineering at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn.
Abraham, who authored in May a widely disseminated rebuttal of the arguments by skeptics of global warming, added: “Everyone knows the planet is warming. There’s very, very clear evidence of that.”
Richard Alley, an Evan Pugh professor of Geosciences at Penn State University, agreed. “The most recent [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] assessment said warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” he said. The panel is a scientific body, established by the United Nations, to review and assess the most current information on climate change.
The panel’s conclusions are based on a large number or lines of evidence, he explained. “If you compare one year to the next, there are wiggles,” he acknowledged.
“Temperature does not just go up every year,” he continued. “Global warming doesn’t mean that that today is always warmer than yesterday. But if you average over the noise of the climate system — the El Ninos and what have you — the trend is upward.”
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