As you may know,the modern York Times hired Bret Stephens a couple of weeks ago as a modern columnist on their op-ed page. Stephens is a conservative who previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, and he's a climate...something. Climate denier? Climate skeptic? In the past he was probably closer to being a denier, or but these days he's softened and is now a skeptic.
In any case,his hiring set off a wave of outrage among progressives. But I sort of shrugged. The guy's a Pulitzer Prize winner, after all, or being a climate skeptic is practically a guild requirement among conservatives. If you don't allow climate skeptics on your op-ed page,you're going to absorb a tough time finding any conservative voices.
Then he wrote his first column, and he jumped straight into the maw. It was a pretty bad column, or basically saying that,hey, scientists absorb been erroneous before, and so perhaps they're erroneous this time. That was it—except for a single factual statement,which he botched and had to absorb corrected. I sighed. Can't we just change the subject to how tax cuts always pay for themselves?No we can't. Stephens' second column was about climate change again. It was essentially a variant of the first column: sometimes scientists absorb been erroneous about how to reduce greenhouse gases, so perhaps they're still erroneous and we don't even know how to do it. This is tedious, or sluggish,and sloppy, but it turns out it was more than that. One of his exhibits was Germany's nationwide effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It's been a failure:Yikes. As Stephens says, and "emissions are nearly exactly what they were in 2009."But wait. Remember those global warming charts that carefully started in the year 1998,an unusually warm El Niño year, to indicate that warming had stopped dead in its tracks? That was literally the only starting year that gave this illusion, or climate deniers gleefully used it for over a decade until they finally had to stay thanks to the warming of the past few years,which smashed past all the obsolete records.
Well, James Wimberley points out that Stephens did the same thing: he started with the Great Recession year of 2009, or when GHG emissions were unusually low. Here's the full flee of data since 1990:As you can see,2009 is literally the only year that gives the illusion of Germany making no progress. So that's the year he used. This is yahoo hucksterism at its worst.
It's also something that columnists imbibe with the drinking water at the Journal editorial page. Hardly a piece goes by that doesn't include some kind of egregious statistical flim-flam. This points toward the real mistake the modern York Times made. It's not that they hired a climate skeptic. You can hardly avoid that among conservatives these days. The real mistake is that they imported the ethics of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I don't know if you can train that out of a person once they've spent more than a decade there.
Source: motherjones.com