The Island of Doubt

While making such a comparison is clearly out of line, it seemed to me that anyone reading the story would come away more impressed by the differences between how Gore and Will handled their errors, rather than any implied similarities. Gore immediately withdrew a problematic sequence from his slide show when it was pointed out that the described trend in weather-related damages was not linked exclusively to global warming. Will to this day refuses to accept that he misrepresented, either deliberately or out of ignorance, the science of climate change.

Regardless of some odd choice of wording from Revkin, I thought the overall effect was one in which Gore comes off looking like the responsible statesman, Will the stubborn child.

I seemed to be in the minority though. Joe Romm, for example, lay waste to another pair of gaskets this week in a two-part excoriation of Revkin for falling for the old false-equivalency game so beloved of climate science pseudoskeptics. Romm insists Gore is innocent of exaggerating any link between the weather-damage data and AGW. In a stretch of an argument reminiscent of Bill Clinton's "it depends on what you mean by 'is' " plea, he insists that Gore's non-specific use of the word "this" to describe the causes of said damage gives the former VP a pass.

Others, including me, are less willing to forgive Gore, in part because the same offending slides were included in the latest version of slide show supplied to The Climate Project volunteer presenters, and we weren't supplied with any guidance on how to describe the slides. It is a show about climate change, after all, and one has to be extremely careful before including dramatic charts and graphs that imply causation, regardless of what one says about it. You know what they say about television news: if the pictures and words conflict, the pictures win.

So, to recap: First, Revkin's story gives us enough details to conclude that while Gore may have exercised hasty judgment in the inclusion of a couple of slides, Will has a problem with reality and responsibility. Second, even if you grant Revkin overstated Gore's mistake, I can't share Romm's decision to give Gore a get-out-of jail-free card. It seemed to me that everyone was over-reacting. As Michael Tobis of the excellent, In it for the Gold blog commented at Romm's blog:

All this hair-splitting is beside the point. Even the worst possible interpretation of Gore's behavior is that he slightly overstated the position of the people gathering the data, was called on it, and reversed himself. It is hard to see this as newsworthy.

But we forget that one man's trivia is another's scandal. The inconvenient truth is, one of the world's most respected and widely circulated science journalists, whatever his intentions, failed to convey to many readers that there's an enormous difference between the way Gore deals with science and the way Will deals with it. Because of the inconvenient timing of the two cases, and the advantage Revkin took of the coincidence, Gore's molehill of an error somehow managed to get at least as much attention, if not more, than Will's ever-growing mountain.

So I am concluding the Revkin, for whom I still have great respect, should be more careful in the future. It's not just Revkin who's at fault, of course. Romm and others who have piled onto Revkin have only made matters worse by effectively doing the pseudoskeptics' dirty work and diverting attention away from the real story. Frak. Even I'm blogging about it (although I'm not going to wade into the debate over Roger Pielke Jr.'s role in the whole thing).

Every journalist, blogger and pundit should remember that it doesn't matter what you meant to say, only what is heard. And just so no one misinterprets what I'm trying to say about whose errors are the most troubling:

COMPARATIVE JUDGMENT FAILURE
George F. Will >> Andy Revkin > Al Gore