Media Mayhem: A plague of ‘think tanks’
I write the Media Mayhem column every week for the Mother Nature Network. Here’s this week’s:
The Goliaths are crazed environmentalists, corrupt scientists and secret socialists, on a mission to manufacture a crisis so they can implement a stealth agenda of government control, toy-sized automobiles and pork-barrel grants — grants the scientists can then use to live off the hard-earned money of taxpayers forever.
Cue evil laugh track: Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!
The Davids are the few brave souls who dare counter that juggernaut — that hoax — by pointing out that science is a complex endeavor, rife with unfulfilled hypotheses, and whose reputations have suffered because of their independence.
You may not see the debate that way. I sure don’t.
Whatever you and I think, though, the David/Goliath storyline, or something like it, will have more to do with the outcome of Congress’ current climate debate than will another dozen studies firming up the actual consensus that climate change is happening, is caused by humans, and is on a trajectory to lay a big whammy on civilization.
The Davids played their role in a Washington hotel last week at the Heartland Institute’s grandly named Third International Conference on Climate Change.
Read the rest of this column on the Mother Nature Network.
And now a word from the alternate universe …
The conservative Heartland Institute released its “Nongovernmental International Panel of Climate Change” at a press conference today. The name is a play off the U.N.’s “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” which documented scientific evidence for global warming in 2007. Pretty witty, huh?
Former University of Virginia professor Fred Singer, a co-author of the report who was described at the conference as “the godfather of global warming realists,” discusses the report here. I gotta warn you, though — for a PR stunt, this clip is kind of a snoozer.
More on the PR and media outfall from this later. If you have any insights or tips, please leave comments here for others.
