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U.S. Environment & Forest Defense

Public Radio Airs Fox News Style Debate Against Climate Change

by reposts

Sat, Mar 31, 2007 3:04PM

On Saturday, March 31st I happened to be listening to KQED when they aired a debate by the organization Intelligence Squared on the motion “Global Warming is Not a Crisis.” The "debate" set as a reference frame that global warming is not a crisis and then had climate scientists debate a popular novel writer, Michael Crichton, to argue that it was a crisis. The moderator brought up misleading evidence of past "scientific" fads like a news media hype briefly in the late 70s that the world was cooling. Crichton chastized the scientists for their energy consumption while giving an argument that there still isn't enough evidence to link CO2 to global warming (his argument style was a bit like that of tobacco executives in the 70s and 80s). While some "science" was used in the debate it mostly consisted of sound bites, which is I guess what one has to expect from a public debate on an actual scientific topic (since it would be boring if people just started showing their data set etc...). At the end of the debate they polled their audience and while before the debate a majority were concerned about climate change, afterwards a majority no longer felt it was a crisis. The radio version of the debate apparently cut out a good part of the live debate andNPR's intro and closing really focused on the competitive nature of the debate and how those who didnt think global warming was a crisis had won.

What bothered me most about KQED's coverage of the debate is that it had the Fox News like feel of a right-wing political message wrapped in a attempt to sound objective. If 90% of those who study climate change feel there is a crisis why would you have a debate treating the arguments as roughly equal and have a moderator ask questions that sounded like they took the right-wing view as a given. If 2% of those studying the effects of tobacco dont think it causes cancer would you air a public debate between a popular novel writer who thinks tobacco doesnt cause problems with scientists who lack debate skills? In this case it was a bit worse since the anti-environmentalists actually stated disagreement with the facts with arguments that sounded like they were based on science.

Hopefully debates like this dont effect public policy much but I fear they do since one can easilly see what effect Fox News has had. Bush's team also seems to do this type of thing on NPR and PBS quite a bit. The common Bush tactic when debating on the News Hour is to deny the truth in a way that limits debate and has one having to choose who to believe rather than being able to decide for one's self based off actual facts.

Here are a few links to some blog entries I found on the “Global Warming is Not a Crisis.” debate on NPR:

Debate Skills? Advantage: Climate Contrarians
http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=debate_skills_advantage_climate_contrari&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Global Warming Is Not a Crisis
http://reconciliationecology.blogspot.com/2007/03/global-warming-is-not-crisis.html

Real Climate: Adventures on the East Side
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/adventures-on-the-east-side/

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