How about a sports analogy?

A laugh for the newsprint nightmare
A world that never was
Where the questions are all why
And the answers are all because
--Bruce Cockburn, "Laughter"

Further to yesterday's post, in which I compared pseudoskeptical propaganda masquerading as informed opinion, what if the same editorial standards were applied to other fields, such as sports journalism? Imagine a newspaper reporter who covers baseball writing something like:

Last night's win evokes the Orioles' come-from-behind World Series victory 1992. Every man on the bench could do no wrong, as if they were in some kind of meditative trance, scoring hit after hit no matter what the Blue Jays' pitchers -- all six -- threw at them.

And imagine if the same writer kept producing such stuff -- making it up with no regard for the historical record or the intelligence of his readers -- column after column, week after week. How long would his or her editors tolerate a lack of respect for the facts? How long would the paper's readers allow it to continue. Not very, I dare say.

Or what if a business reporter at CNN were to make nightly references to the Great Depression of 1917, and how Herbert Hoover subsequently pulled America out of the red and narrowly averted another stock market collapse in 1929? And that Harry Truman was a Soviet spy?

Of how about a scenario in which an member of the Entertainment Tonight editorial team presented a serious, week-long series on the hitherto secret evidence that Elvis Presley is alive and well and living in Boca Raton?

We don't even tolerate it in other science subjects like evolution. When's the last time you read a story about HIV mutations that included a section devoted to creationist claims that evolution isn't real, so any conclusions drawn by evolutionary biologists must be treated with a grain of salt? (This last one is a greyer field, I sadly admit, but I think my point survives.)

All of these would likely be followed by severe consequences for the journalists, and the editors and directors who allowed such drivel to make it to print or air. You just don't get away with outlandish fairy tales in most fields.

Except, of course, if you're talking about global warming (OK, and weapons of mass destruction in unfriendly countries -- but then we're safely in a realm we expect to be dominated by spin and distortion, so it doesn't count.) Day after day, night after night, reporters, columnists and television and radio personalities tell us things that simply aren't true about planetary ecology.

Sure, we can debate the causes of the surprisingly rapid deglaciation of Greenland. A new letter in Nature Geoscience does just that, suggesting global climate trends may not be to blame for at least one glacier's disintegration. We can cast doubt on the origin of the atmospheric methane that seems to be on the increase again after a few decades of stable levels. Likewise, the schedule for an ice-free summer in the Arctic Ocean is up for grabs.

But when someone says the sun is responsible for more global temperature increase than fossil fuel emissions, that's entirely different. It's without a scientific basis. So you can bring it to the attention of the offending journalist(s). When they repeat the claim, you know it's not just sloppy reporting, it's an offense against journalistic ethics.

Sure, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are just entertainers. But I've had my attention drawn to Beck's anti-global warming rants by scientists who wonder if the guy isn't on to something. After all, why would his bosses let him say such stuff night after night if there wasn't some grain of truth to it?

If we don't tolerate BS in sports or business or entertainment or even other scientific fields, so why do we tolerate it when it comes to what is the most serious public policy, economic and environment threats of our time?