Worst news article ever published on global warming?

UPDATE:  I emailed MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel about the smear that Richard Lindzen launched at him with the help of a credulous Boston Globe reporter stenographer.  His reply is below.

I’ve been bombarded with emails from folks stunned by a shamefully bad Globe article by Beth Daley, “A cooling trend.”  It certainly qualifies as one of the worst news articles ever published on global warming.

But is it the worst piece ever?  I’d love your thoughts.  The competition for that title is, unfortunately, very tough (see “And the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism goes to “¦“)

The piece does have the four horsemen of awful climate journalism:  Dreadful headline, grotesque imbalance (including a staggering choice for “tie-breaker”), a total lack of understanding or even interest in climate science, and a wholly unsubstantiated, near-libelous slur against a leading scientist.

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Plus a new record 12-month global temperature, as predicted

For an update, see NASA: First half of 2010 breaks the thermometer “” despite “recent minimum of solar irradiance.”

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It was the hottest April on record in the NASA dataset.  More significantly, following fast on the heels of the hottest March and hottest Jan-Feb-March on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-Feb-March-April on record [click on figure to enlarge].

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Downplaying the BP disaster, Gov. Barbour encourages tourists to ‘enjoy the beach’ as dead dolphins wash ashore

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) has been an outlier amongst Gulf Coast governors, downplaying the BP oil spill instead of working to mitigate the disaster and rethinking the wisdom of offshore drilling.  TP has the story in this twin repost.

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Improving science education requires rethinking academic priorities

Since President Obama’s announcement of the Educate to Innovate program in November 2009, an encouraging number of technology and media companies, non-profit organizations and government agencies have been working in concert to strengthen the nation’s approach to science education. But the reality is that the lion’s share of transformation must come from within: from school systems, in the case of K-12 education, and from the academy, in the case of higher education.

A position paper recently issued by the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) illustrates this point in the context of higher education.  Vikram Savkar, Senior VP & Publishing Director for Education Markets at NPG has the story in this repost.

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President Obama’s 2011 budget proposes to eliminate nine different tax expenditures that primarily benefit oil and gas companies. Cutting these special tax deductions, preferences, and credits would save the government about $45 billion over the next 10 years.  CAP’s Sima Gandhi has the story in this repost:

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