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.
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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.
