Letter and Response
A letter to the editor from Russell Seitz and Paul Thacker’s response
The following letter and response is related to "How the Wall Street Journal and Rep. Barton celebrated a global-warming skeptic", which was published on August 31, 2005.
Letter
Paul Thacker takes a dim view of selective citation by climate contrarians. So do I. But what about his own? He singles out “writing in the Wall Street Journal discussing climate-change science ... in the opinion sections of the newspaper, including three book reviews. In one review, Russell Seitz points out, Billions of dollars are spent annually on understanding aspects of climate change too ephemeral to elicit consensus...”
But this sentence is not about climate prediction, but seismic forecasting. Thacker has simply chopped off its inconvenient ending: “...instead of the concrete threats posed by continents in collision.” I noted how lack of tsunami warnings cost 3000,000 [sic] lives last December, not in the opinion section, but a Taste Page review of Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders’ book Earthquakes In Human History.
Thacker invokes Princeton hydrodynamicist Jerry Mahlman’s judgment that the climate debate has grown “lampoonable.” I must agree, as I quoted Mahlman myself in an essay on climate change in The National Interest in 1990. Then, as now, his candor was refreshing: “Until such decadal-scale fluctuations are understood or are predictable, it will remain difficult to diagnose the specific signals of permanent climate change as they evolve.“
Thacker’s writing illustrates anew what that essay noted a decade ago: “A disturbing reality confronts us: the deliberate creation of a double standard, with one set of facts for internal scientific discourse and another for public consumption.”
Russell Seitz
Cambridge, Mass
Mnestheus@aol.com
Web Page: http://members.aol.com/__121b_9HvrPyoLLK%2BxpBcWu6dVxiIINYGpN0RRv9aCeTNapfM
Response
The quote by Seitz was simply meant to serve as one of the many examples of a pattern that I uncovered, in which Wall Street Journal opinion writers take random swipes at the science of climate change. Another example from the same book review by Seitz was this sentence: “As mountainous waves swelled out across the Indian Ocean, the Maldives, an archipelago low enough to trip over, went under and came up again before Greenpeace could blame global warming.”
Another example: Steve Forbes wrote an essay about presidential politics but still found the space to refer to global warming as one of many “fashionable and apocalyptic fantasies.”
As for the quote by Mahlman that Seitz puts forth... Science is not static; our knowledge continues to grow. How unearthing a statement made 15 years ago by Mahlman or anyone else is supposed to shed light on the current understanding of climate science is beyond comprehension.
Paul D. Thacker
Associate Editor, ES&T
