NYT's Enviro Reporter Gillis Giddily Tosses 'Far Right,' 'Denialist' Smears in Latest Climate Change Sermon

By Clay Waters | June 16, 2015 | 11:05 AM EDT

Justin Gillis, the most avowedly activist environmental reporter at The New York Times, made the front page of Tuesday's Science Times with "The Lightning Rod," featuring climate scientist heroine Naomi Oreskes, author of "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming." Gillis called Oreskes a subject of "far right" attacks from "people pushing climate denial," "denial" being a liberally loaded label.

That 2010 book, now a documentary, lumped in marketers who denied the harmful effects of tobacco use to critics of the global warming theory -- even though the vaunted computer models brandished by those global warming alarmists have yet to be accurate about the predicted rise of temperatures, which have stubbornly refused to rise at all over the last 15 years (absent post-hoc tweaking of the data).

The subhead to Gillis's article: "At the center of a whirlwind over global warming, a historian counters attacks by climate-science denialists." "Denialist" is a liberally loaded version of the usual journalistic term "skeptic," and carries a whiff of "Holocaust denial." Gillis's profile was almost totally positive, and heavy on the unbalanced "denialist" label.

Back on February 17 of this year, Gillis pondered a liberal petition insisting that climate "skeptics" be tarred with the "denialist" label by the news media, in "Verbal Warming: Labels in the Climate Debate."

Some make scientifically ludicrous claims, such as denying that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas or rejecting the idea that humans are responsible for its increase in the atmosphere. Others deny that Earth is actually warming, despite overwhelming evidence that it is, including the rapid melting of billions of tons of land ice all over the planet.

Gillis's Tuesday profile continued:

Dr. Oreskes is fast becoming one of the biggest names in climate science -- not as a climatologist, but as a defender who uses the tools of historical scholarship to counter what she sees as ideologically motivated attacks on the field.

....

She helps raise money to defend researchers targeted for criticism by climate change denialists. She has become a heroine to activist college students, supporting their demand that universities and other institutions divest from fossil fuels. Climatologists, though often reluctant themselves to get into fights, have showered her with praise for being willing to do it.

....

Dr. Oreskes’s approach has been to dig deeply into the history of climate change denial, documenting its links to other episodes in which critics challenged a developing scientific consensus.

Those included "dubious tactics had been used over decades to cast doubt on scientific findings relating to subjects like acid rain, the ozone shield, tobacco smoke and climate change."

The central players were serious scientists who had major career triumphs during the Cold War, but in subsequent years apparently came to equate environmentalism with socialism, and government regulation with tyranny.

(Of course, the far-left losing side of the Cold War drifted toward an embrace of the theory of global warming as a means to attack capitalism. Thomas Friedman, Times columnist, has repeatedly embraced Communist China-style authoritarian measures to solve the problem.)

Gillis wrote:

In a 2010 book, Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway called these men “Merchants of Doubt,” and this spring the book became a documentary film, by Robert Kenner. At the heart of both works is a description of methods that were honed by the tobacco industry in the 1960s and have since been employed to cast doubt on just about any science being cited to support new government regulations.

Dr. Oreskes, the more visible and vocal of the “Merchants” authors, has been threatened with lawsuits and vilified on conservative websites, and routinely gets hate mail calling her a communist or worse.

....

Some of the voices criticizing her -- scientists like Dr. [S. Fred] Singer and groups like the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington -- were barely known to her at the time, Dr. Oreskes said in an interview. Just who were they?

She had connected by then with Dr. Conway, an official NASA historian who, working on his own time, helped her dig into some important archives. It did not take them long to document that this group, which included prominent Cold War scientists, had been attacking environmental research for decades, challenging the science of the ozone layer and acid rain, even the finding that breathing secondhand tobacco smoke was harmful. Trying to undermine climate science was simply the latest project.

....

Following Dr. Oreskes’s cue, researchers have in recent years developed a cottage industry of counting scientific papers and polling scientists. The results typically show that about 97 percent of working climate scientists accept that global warming is happening, that humans are largely responsible, and that the situation poses long-term risks, though the severity of those risks is not entirely clear. That wave of evidence has prompted many national news organizations to stop portraying the field as split evenly between scientists who are convinced and unconvinced.

Not even Scientific American, which tends toward liberal conventional wisdom, would go that far, noting that the "97%" figure is a simplistic, bumper-sticker appeal to authority: "The scientists examined 4,014 abstracts on climate change and found 97.2 percent of the papers assumed humans play a role in global warming. That statement quickly got boiled down in the popular media to a much simpler message: that 97 percent of scientists believe climate change is caused by humans. " That's not the same thing as what Gillis is claiming.

Even when he makes a feint toward fairness, Gillis can't stop being snotty:

The themes in “Merchants of Doubt” have hardly gone unchallenged, though, and the protests have not always originated on the far right. A vigorous objection has come from the family of William A. Nierenberg, one of the scientists singled out for criticism in the book. Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway accused Dr. Nierenberg of weakening two major scientific reports that he led in the early 1980s, one on acid rain and one on global warming.

Gillis portrayed even Oreskes' missteps as triumphs.

Dr. Oreskes's critics have taken delight in searching out errors in her books and other writings, prompting her to post several corrections. They have generally been minor, though, like describing a pH of six as neutral, when the correct number is seven. Dr. Oreskes described that as a typographical error.

In the leaked emails, Dr. Singer told a group of his fellow climate change denialists that he felt that Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway had libeled him. But in an interview, when pressed for specific errors in the book that might constitute libel, he listed none. Nor did he provide such a list in response to a follow-up email request.

....

However much she might be hated by climate change denialists, Dr. Oreskes is often welcomed on college campuses these days. She usually outlines the decades of research supporting the idea that human emissions pose serious risks.

Why wouldn't a liberal scientist who favors massive regulation be welcomed on a typical liberal college campus?

Gillis concluded: