Considering climate

As soon as I filed Saturday’s story asking local experts about Copenhagen talks and the Climate-Gate e-mails, I knew I’d have some e-mail of my own to wade through this morning — from climate change skeptics who were displeased with the opinions of those experts, and with my presentation of those opinions.

Indeed, I got a few critical e-mails, although not as many as I expected. And all of them were courteous, contrary to the tone of some recent letters to the editor.

An e-mail excerpt:

“It seems to me that your article on climate change was one-sided, as most popular press articles are. You give much coverage to those who believe that mankind is primarily responsible for global warming, in effect discrediting those who disagree.”

This implies that I cherry-picked the experts with whom I spoke, that I only wanted to quote those who told me what I supposedly want to hear — that anthropogenic climate change is real. Let me set the record straight. I called the University of the Pacific, Delta College, Stanislaus State and U.C. Merced (not all that local, but very active in climate science). While I had some difficulty reaching all the folks I’d intended, those I did reach had similar opinions on the subject. The stolen emails, they said, did not erode the fundamental science of climate change.

Since that is what the local experts said, I printed it. If they had said that the emails altered their beliefs about climate change, I would have printed that, too.

I also included opinions from a couple of non-scientists — one an advocate, the other more of an interested and intelligent observer who is somewhat critical of the science. I did not do this to add some kind of “balance” to the story; rather, I thought it would be relevant to report how the feelings of interested members of the public may or may not have changed since Climate-Gate.

Journalistic objectivity does not mean giving 50/50 time to two sides of any given issue. My goal in this story was to find out the opinions of local earth sciences experts; I did just that, and I printed those opinions. It is a perfectly objective story.

But as always, you’re free to disagree! Now on with those e-mails…