More silliness in Canada

It'll all go back to normal if we put our nation first
But the trouble with normal is
It always gets worse.
-- Bruce Cockburn, "The trouble with normal"

It's hard to know what's worse: an economist who thinks he understand climatology better than climatologists, or a news outlet that thinks asking an economist for his thoughts on climatology is a good idea. Because I've spent more than 20 years in the journalism business, I'm more depressed by the latter. But I'm open to persuasion in favor of the former.

Joe Romm ably tears apart the thoughts of Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn, who told a Canadian journalist, CanWest's David Staples,who should know better, that Canada will probably see net benefits from climate change.

"You're lucky because you're a northern-latitude country, Mendelsohn says. "If you add it all up, it's a good thing for Canada."

Right. Why, then, are only "university economists and anthropologists" making such a case? Staples calls them a group of "global warming experts" but fails to tell us how he came to such a description. None of the so-called experts in his story seem to have even a passing familiarity with the actual science of climate change.

For example:

... on the whole, moderate climate change of an additional two degrees will likely be beneficial for the world, says Benny Peiser, an anthropologist at John Moores University in Liverpool, England.

For countries like Canada and Russia, though, even more dramatic warming wouldn't be a problem, Peiser says. "They could cope with that kind of increase, though other regions might struggle."

We can assume Peiser is talking in degrees Celcius, this being a Canadian paper and Peiser being an academic at a British school. Two degrees Celcius might be "moderate" in comparison to rises of 4°C, but where did he get the notion that the world will benefit from such a rise? Just about everything coming from the scientific community suggests otherwise. Two degrees may be inevitable now, thanks to the inertia of the system, but Peiser is talking about an additional two degrees, presumably on top of the 0.6-0.8 we've already experienced. Add another couple of degrees and we're into dangerous tipping point territory.

Sadly, Staples story is not an aberration. For some reason, the Globe and Mail and the CBC continue to pay Rex Murphy to use words like "hierophants" in an effort to appear learned on an infinite number of sujects, including climatology. Murphy's latest obfuscatory rant makes about as much sense as you'd expect if you asked a major-league shortstop to weigh in on quantum chromodynamics. (Not that I have anything against shortstops.) Get this:

Now I introduce this spotty survey not in any spirit of contention or with intent to counter what so many people hilariously refer to as the "science" of global warming. One season's weather is not a guide to another, an insight captured more poetically by the proverb "one swallow does not make a spring." I am, most certainly, not going to make the error of our global warming hierophants who leap with troubling eagerness on any "extreme weather event" and pilot it with ferocity to the conclusion that we are all doomed. They are rhetoricians of less scruple than I.

If you're not familiar with "heirophant," you're not alone. It has something to do with the tarot deck, or an evangelist of some kind. But you don't need to know what it means to see the flaw in Murphy's argument. It's not those who understand the science of climatology who leap on every extreme weather event as evidence of climate change. If anything, AGW proponents go to great lengths to draw attention away from anecdotal events toward long-term trends. It's those who can't seem to accept the science that jump on every cold weather day as evidence that the globe isn't warming.

I sometimes wonder about the ethical dimension of knowingly allowing your correspondents and commentators to mislead audiences about the most serious public policy challenge of our time. I mean, how long would I last on CNN or even Fox News if I continually repeated the "scientific fact" that whites are more intelligent that blacks, or that all Jews are servants of the devil? But it's OK to lie about the science of planetary ecology.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting we should make pseudoscientific propaganda illegal. What I am suggesting is that the folks running our media need to think a bit more about the ethics of deliberately misleading the public at such a critical time. And we need to let the editors know we've had enough.