The week the article appeared, I came into my office one morning to find a voicemail message from a reporter for National Public Radio. He wanted to interview me concerning my article in Science. Visions of glory danced in front of my eyes. I was going to be on national radio. Surely, it was only a matter of time before I would be a regular guest on the McNeil-Lehrer news hour on PBS. Excited, I called the reporter back. But all of my fantasies were immediately dispelled. The reporter focused in on the last sentence in the Science paper. He asked me, did I really mean to say that? Did I really intend to imply that the warming in North America may have been due to natural variability? Without hesitation, I said "yes". He replied, "Well then, I guess we have no story. That's not what people are interested in. People are only interested if the warming is due to human activities. Goodbye." And he hung up on me. It was my first realization that the media intentionally filter the information the public receives.
A year later, I received a telephone call from an author working on an article for International Wildlife, a magazine published by the National Wildlife Federation, an environmental advocacy group We discussed some of my work, and talked about the implication of borehole temperature measurements for global warming. Subsequently, the Editor of International Wildlife sent me a draft article for review. I was horrified. My work and comments had been taken out of context and used in such a way as to exaggerate the magnitude of climate change. I made some pointed comments, and the article was toned down a little. I later learned that the author of the International Wildlife article was not a scientist, but a lawyer. I had been naive. I had assumed that everyone was like me--they were interested in the truth. But a lawyer's job isn't to discover truth, it's to win an argument. Neither is an advocacy organization interested in truth--they are committed to advocating a certain position regardless of the facts.
With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. So one of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."
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Originally Posted by Prada
