Monday, February 5, 2007
News An inconvenient state of denial
Posted by Scott Freeman on Mon, Feb 5, 2007 at 4:45 PM
What is it with the AJC and global warming?
A few weeks ago, in an attempt to explain our balmy January weather, the lede of a story flatly stated that "global warming, it's not." It's not?
Then on Saturday, Stacy Shelton wrote a story that quotes Gerrit Hoogenboom, a University of Georgia biological and agricultural engineer, as debunking global warming.
"We used to be able to grow citrus crops in South Georgia," the AJC quotes Hoogenboom. "To me, I think [climate change is] still a natural variation."
Maybe he thinks that. But it doesn't reflect the reality of the scientific community at large. What the story doesn't mention is that Hoogenboom is at odds with the hundreds of international scientists who worked on a new report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states it is "very likely" that climate change is caused by human activity.
It also ignores a study that, as far as I can tell, went unreported in the AJC. A mapping of of the state's trees indicates that the state is getting demonstrably warmer.
The AJC story does get this part right: the state's Republican leaders are still taking an ostrich point of view when it comes to global warming. Gov. Sonny Perdue doesn't want to hear about it.
Even the politics of global warming are lukewarm in the state. The governor doesn't talk about it. Neither do most other state leaders. State Sen. Eric Johnson, R-Savannah, president pro tem of the Senate, may have been more truthful than he intended in the AJC story when he said, "It's really hard to ask politicians to think about the election next year and think about what the coast is going to look like in 100 or 200 years."
If that's not his job, to worry about what the coast is going to look like in 100 years, then what is?
Comments (1)
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I do not think the state of Georgia is that different from the rest of the United States. We are not supporting any particularly prominent contrarian scientists, and we do have two of the most prominent people speaking for the scientific consensus: Heidi Cullen (Weather Channel) and Judith Curry (Georgia Tech). The AJC does a poor to mediocre job of science reporting in general. CNN used to do better, until they started trying to compete with FOX in being "fair and balanced."
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