Sept. 22, 6:45 p.m. | Updated below |
Earlier this month, I noticed a glaring error in an astonishingly distorted Sept. 6 piece on climate, clouds and cosmic rays on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government blog. There’s been plenty of overheated gushing on this subject by climate naysayers in recent weeks, triggered by an important, but heavily over-interpreted, experiment. But this piece stands out.

The author, Chriss W. Street, a self-described “nationally recognized financial writer,” led the piece with this breathless pair of sentences:

Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world’s most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth’s atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man. One of the report’s authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: “I think it is such a blatant falsification.”

The glaring problem, amid many broader problems, was that Jyrki Kauppinen is not one of the paper’s 63 authors, as I noted in an item I submitted to Mediabugs, a Web site devoted to correcting errors in media reports of all kinds.

This Big Government glitch is particularly notable given that on August 29, the main Breitbart news blog ran a wire story in which one of the paper’s actual authors explained the tentative nature of the results this way:

“Anyone who believes that we see an enhancement of clouds through cosmic rays is moving too fast,” Urs Baltensperger, head of atmospheric chemistry at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Villigen, Switzerland, said.

Mark Follman, one of the founders of Mediabugs, wrote a piece for Mother Jones this morning with more background on the cosmic ray post, noting that repeated attempts to correct the error, so far, have been met by silence.

Follman asked me to offer my deconstruction of this kind of distorting opportunism. Here’s the relevant section of his post:

According to Revkin, the Big Government piece is a classic example of what could be called “single-study syndrome,” which tends to turn up whenever a political agenda is threatened or supported by a specific line of scientific inquiry. “Some new finding, however tentative, gets highlighted while the broader suite of research on a tough subject is downplayed or ignored,” Revkin told me in an email. “And few questions are tougher than clarifying the role of clouds in climate change.” The appetite for headline-grabbing conclusions, he said, gives rise to fast-and-loose science coverage that torques public discourse until it’s mainly hyperbole.

I also noted that the media more generally, through the eternal quest for the “front-page thought,” amplify this process.

It’s no wonder that, despite occasional shifts in polls and deeply polarized small factions at the edges of climate discourse (nourished by this kind of material), the public largely remains disengaged on the issue.

Sept. 22, 6:34 p.m. | Updates |

Big Government finally responded to Mediabug with an amusing note added to its piece acknowledging what it termed a “minor citation error.”

Single-study syndrome, which I’ve criticized when it afflicts the green end of the climate spectrum, is in fine form on the fossil side, as well. Note the celebratory cosmic certainty of Larry Bell, James “It’s the Sun, Stupid” Delingpole and Lawrence Solomon.