Bickering and defensive, Newsweek reporters have lost the public’s trust.

Another week, another staggering journalistic lapse in climate science reporting at a once-great media outlet.

How bad is “Uncertain Science,” by Stefan Theil, European economics editor for the near-dead newsweekly?  I asked Dr. Robert J. Brulle for a comment, and the Drexel University “expert on environmental communications,” wrote me back:

This article is basically a condensed version of the climate denier viewpoint.  Mr. Theil significantly distorts the situation, and grossly fails to ground his story in the actual facts, all to support his biased position.  Obviously, Newsweek doesn’t have any fact-checking capability.  How this counts as journalism is beyond me.

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The three worst direct impacts to humans from our unsustainable use of energy will, I think, be Dust-Bowlification and sea level rise and ocean poisoning:  Hell and High Water.  But another impact — far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog — may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly: war, conflict, competition for arable and/or habitable land.

We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source “” if not the source “” of two of our biggest recent wars. As the NYT reported last August:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

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Last week, I asked readers to “Name the BP oil disaster and write Obama’s ‘pivot’ speech to the climate and clean energy jobs bill.”  A few people actually wrote entire speeches.  Here is one by guest blogger Stewart J. Hudson, President of the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, suggests Obama deliver a speech centering on the next holiday weekend, July 4:

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Tom Tomorrow’s terrific cartoon in Salon is subtitled, “It’s called the Doomsday Bomb and it’s perfectly safe. Trust us.”

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