The former is self-correcting, the latter has become self-destructive

UPDATE:  Revkin replies below with a tweet that pretty much makes my case.

UPDATE 2:  Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, whom the NYT itself quoted last year as “an expert on environmental communications,” writes me that Revkin “fundamentally misrepresents the actual history of climate science.” His full comments are below.

So New York Times blogger Andy Revkin has written perhaps his worst post yet. The blogosphere and my inbox are filled with the most amazing rebukes I’ve seen from scientists and others, which I’m reposting here, including Steve Easterbrook’s, “When did ignorance become a badge of honour for journalists?”

Revkin’s guilt-by-(distant)-association piece, “On Harvard Misconduct, Climate Research and Trust,” betrays a remarkable lack of understanding of the scientific process. And what is most ironic is that if you replace the word “research” with “reporting” — and “science” with “journalism” — throughout his piece, you get a much more plausible indictment of modern climate journalism.

As one of the country’s leading climatologists emails me (paraphrasing Revkin’s final graf):

Can we trust Andy Revkin to cover the science of climate change in an honest way without misquoting scientists, drawing false equivalencies, and interpreting all new findings through the myopic lens of a contrarian narrative? I wouldn’t be a scientist if I answered “yes”.

Science blogger Eli Rabett of Rabett Run fame writes (here):

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Our guest bloggers are Center for American Progress CEO John Podesta and Agriculture Policy Director Jake Caldwell. The original, full version of this post appears at ForeignPolicy.com.

There was already little margin for error in a world where, for the first time in history, 1 billion people are suffering from chronic hunger. But the fragility of world food markets has been underscored by the tragic events of this summer. The brutal wildfires and crippling drought in Russia are decimating wheat crops and prompting shortsighted export bans. The ongoing floods and widespread crop destruction in Pakistan are creating a massive humanitarian crisis that has left more than 1,600 dead and some 16 million homeless and hungry in a region vital to U.S. national security. These and other climate crises trigger widespread food-price volatility, disproportionately and relentlessly devastating the world’s poor. The spiking price of wheat is up 50 percent since early June.

Fortunately, there are signs we will likely avoid a repeat of the 2007-2008 food crisis, when prices jumped as much as 100 percent and led to deadly riots in Port-au-Prince and Mogadishu. This year, bumper crops in the United States, alongside replenished wheat stocks globally, may be adequate to offset shortages due to the fires in Russia. But these short-term measures should not lull us into complacency or a false sense of confidence. We still have neither a strategy nor a solution to ending global hunger.

In the short term, the United States must implement U.S. President Barack Obama’s promise to commit $3.5 billion to food security assistance. Since he made the pledge in 2009, only $812 million has been allocated. Surely the United States can do better, and at a faster pace. Emergency food aid is needed now to prevent famine and needless deaths in Niger, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and northern Nigeria. Congress should increase U.S. contributions to the World Food Program and insist on accountability and reform in the distribution of more than $2 billion in annual U.S. food aid.

Looking beyond the immediate crisis, the United States and other developed countries must renew long-neglected investments in agriculture assistance across the developing world, targeting small farmers as the fundamental drivers of economic growth. While the United States provides more than half of the world’s food aid, agriculture assistance today stands at only 3.5 percent of overall U.S. development aid, down from 18 percent in 1979. We must also improve how this assistance is targeted. We can reap lasting results by focusing on soil and water conservation and improved crop varieties rather than carbon-intensive fertilizers. Scientific research and appropriate biotechnology can deliver significant crop yield gains and water savings if conducted in a safe and transparent manner. We also must invest in women, who represent up to 80 percent of the food producers in many developing countries, but frequently lack the support and services that will allow them to reinvest hard-earned agricultural gains into health and education for their families.

But lasting gains in agricultural productivity will require something more — action to confront climate change. Food shortages resulting from severe crop losses will occur more frequently and take longer to recover from as more people become vulnerable to extreme weather events like the droughts and flooding we see today in Russia and Pakistan. The World Bank predicts that developing countries will require $75 billion to $100 billion a year for the next 40 years to adapt to the effects of climate change on agricultural productivity, infrastructure, and disease.

This year, we may be able to limit the damage to a single supply shock in Russia and Eastern Europe. But even in the best of times, our global food system is stretched to the breaking point by the ever-present challenges of population growth, increased demand from changing diets, higher energy costs, and more extreme weather. Experts at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimate global agricultural productivity must double by 2050 to keep pace with increased demand. Unless we take immediate action, we are destined to race from food crisis to food crisis for generations to come, with grim consequences for the world’s poor and our own national security.

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books”¦.

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts”¦.

– George Orwell, “Why I write”

I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to force us to face unpleasant facts (see here).

What I have learned most from the success of my blog, from the rapid growth in subscribers and visitors and comments, along with the increasing number of websites that link to or reprint my posts, is that there is in fact a great hunger out there for the bluntest possible talk. It is a hunger to learn the truth about the dire nature of our energy and climate situation, about the grave threat to our children and future generations, about the vast but still achievable scale of the solutions, about the forces in politics and media that impede action””a hunger to face unpleasant facts head on.

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A single major error can damage a news organization. But incessant lesser ones can be more harmful. Like a cancer, they gradually destroy credibility and eventually sever the organization’s bond of trust with its audience.

Many readers say that’s happening with The Post….

It’s an industrywide problem. Teresa Schmedding, president of the American Copy Editors Society, predicts more burnout. “There’s only so long you can work in complete and utter chaos and keep your energy level up,” said Schmedding, who is with the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago.

Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander has written a devastating piece on the state of the modern media, “As errors grow, so does a credibility gap.”

Ever-shrinking newsrooms and increased pressure on surviving journalists are destroying two thirds of Joseph Pulitzer’s “standing order to his staff” of reporters:  “ACCURACY. TERSENESS. ACCURACY.”

I’m going to excerpt this must read-piece at length because it contains an unintended irony that connects the growing number of small mistakes to the far larger and more dangerous mistakes the Post and the rest of the status quo media are now making on human-caused climate change:

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