Two dreadful, tunnel-vision articles in the New York Times suggest the “paper of record” must rethink how it covers the most important issue of our time.

Yes, the NYT has the biggest climate team, but their reporting by stovepipe (rather than by team), renders that staff largely useless. Indeed, it may be less than useless, as these articles make clear.

Let’s start with today’s front-page story “Severe Drought Adds to Hardships in California” on the state’s record drop in snowpack and rainfall. Even though there is abundant science that both impacts are precisely what we would expect from human-caused climate change, reporter Jesse McKinley never mentions the subject at all. Quite the reverse, he opens the piece:

The country’s biggest agricultural engine, California’s sprawling Central Valley, is being battered by the recession like farmland most everywhere. But in an unlucky strike of nature, the downturn is being deepened by a severe drought that threatens to drive up joblessness, increase food prices and cripple farms and towns.

So not only does McKinley ignore a likely contributor to the drought and snowpack loss, he attributes the whole damn thing to “an unlucky strike of nature.”

No wonder the public is not terribly concerned about global warming and fails to understand that humans are changing the climate now. The only surprising thing is that the NYT itself is surprised that the public is underinformed (see “NYT‘s Revkin seems shocked by media’s own failure to explain climate threat“).

The NYT did not make this mistake when it reported on Australia’s drought — because it used team-based reporting (see CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story — never mention climate change). I will return to this point at the end.

Moreover, the impacts California is experiencing are not some obscure or distant prediction of climate change — they are so well-known and well accepted that even that bastion of climate denial, the Bush administration, not only acknowledged them in a December 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report, Abrupt Climate Change, but warned they may be just around the corner (see USGS stunner: SW faces “permanent drying” by 2050):

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The Center for American Progress Action Fund and John Podesta are hosting a forum entitled “National Clean Energy Project: Building the New Economy” on Monday, February 23, 2009 in Washington, DC. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is Honorary Chair. Live stream and info are here.

Confirmed attendees include Senator Reid, President William Jefferson Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), and Representative Ed Markey (D-MA).

The NCEP builds on the August 2008 “National Clean Energy Summit” sponsored by Senator Reid, CAPAF, the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The participants concluded inadequate access to transmission was one of the most significant barriers to widespread development of renewable energy.

This forum will focus on modernizing and expanding the electricity grid, integrating energy efficiency and distributed generation into operation and regulation, rapidly increasing transmission capacity for renewable energy, and reducing our nation’s dependence on foreign oil.

The following has been sent to Autumn Brewington, op-ed page editor for the Washington Post, Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of The Washington Post, Alan Shearer, editorial director of The Washington Post Writers Group, and Andy Alexander, Washington Post ombudsman.

To the editors of the Washington Post:

George F. Will’s column of February 15, 2009, “Dark Green Doomsayers,” contained certain factual inaccuracies despite the “multi-layered editing process” it underwent. Several bloggers have volunteered their time to fact-check Mr. Will’s column. Here is a suggested correction based on their work:

George Will’s Feb. 15, 2009 column mischaracterized vaguely characterized a statement by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu on the threat of catastrophic snowpack decline in California due to global warming. Chu was referring to an end-of-the century scenario, not a near-term threat.

Will’s column claimed that experts cited a 2008 decline in “global sea ice” as evidence of man-made global warming. Scientists cited the observed decline in Arctic, not global sea ice.

Will’s column claimed that the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center said that global sea ice levels are “now equal to those of 1979.” Although the center university said that global sea ice levels were “near or slightly lower than those of late 1979″ at the start of January, global sea ice levels are now eight percent below their levels in February 1979.

Will’s column claimed the U.N. World Meteorological Organization said “there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.” According to the WMO, global warming is continuing, with the past decade the warmest on record.

Will’s column argued that imminent global cooling was a predicted planetary catastrophe in the 1970s. There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that imminent global cooling was a threat.

Will’s column cited articles from Science magazine and Science News to imply the authors expected an imminent ice age. The Science article instead predicted an ice age within several thousand years, “ignoring anthropogenic effects.” The Science News article described climatology as an “infant science” and discussed predictions of manmade global warming that have since proven to be accurate.

UPDATE: Will’s column misidentified the source of global sea ice data as the “University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center.” The actual source was a working group of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Atmospheric Sciences, informally known as the Polar Research Group.

The Washington Post and George Will regret the errors.

(HT: Progress Report, ClimateProgress, The Loom, TPM Muckraker, The Vine, Island of Doubt, and New Mexico Science)

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So how does Sen. Inhofe (R-OIL) spread his disinformation, other than his website (see “Uber-denier Inhofe misquotes Hadley, gives big wet Valentine’s kiss to Pielke — go figure!“)? This post first run in WonkRoom, “Marc Morano’s Pack Of Climate Denial Jokers,” explains.

Marc Morano, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK)’s environmental communications director, sits at the center of the right-wing global warming denier propaganda machine — of fifty-two people. Conservative columnist Fred Barnes recently refused to tell TPM Muckraker who’s informed him “the case for global warming” is falling apart, but all signs point to Marc Morano.

Morano’s “entire job,” Gristmill’s David Roberts explains, “is to aggregate every misleading factoid, every attack on climate science or scientists, every crank skeptical statement from anyone in the world and send it all out periodically in email blasts” to the right-wing echo chamber.

The Wonk Room has acquired Morano’s email list, and we can now reveal the pack of climate skeptics, conservative bloggers, and corporate hacks who feed the misinformation machine. Promoted on the Drudge Report and Fox News, Morano’s moronic misinformation enters mainstream discourse through columns by Barnes, George Will, Robert Samuelson, and others. Many in the Morano gang are funded by right-wing think tanks, though a few are committed activists, conspiracy theorists who believe their homebrew interpretations of climate data. Others are aging scientists with strong conservative beliefs, motivating them to challenge action on global warming not because they disbelieve its existence, but because they are ideologically opposed to regulation of pollution:

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