In his climate-change ain’t happening State of the Union speech of Sept. 25th, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) makes the claim that climate change “skeptic” scientists do not get a fair share of media coverage. But, according to DeSmogBlog a quick infomart media search of US papers shows there have been more than 350 mentions of Fred Singer, Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, William Grey, Roger Pielke, Richard Linzen and Patrick Michaels.
It seems the infamous gang of climate change “skeptics” got mentioned, on average, once every 5 days in North American major print outlets.
I’m not sure how that compares to the non-skeptics, they don’t say, so I asked Richard Littlemore of DeSmogBlog to expand:
“I presume the argument here is that people who recognize the overwhelming evidence of climate change are getting an unfair amount of media coverage,” he told me, “while the skeptics are being bullied into silence. Woefully, this is pretty much the opposite of what is truly happening.”
He points to a peer-reviewed paper from Boykoff and Boykoff [link is now dead] that wades into the subject in some detail. The short version, according to Littlemore is this: “The climate change discussion in peer-reviewed scientific journals includes no papers whatsoever challenging the theory of anthropogenic global warming (check Oreskes in Science Magazine), while in the mainstream press, cranks like Singer and Soon get their [allegedly] unscientific denials mentioned in more than half the stories.”