Barrel Strength

From the lengthy Comments stream on Doug Saunders’ truly pathetic piece on page one of the Globe this morning.  It does not matter that the article is biased towards the status quo as the Globe has always been a stalwart defender of the overdog.  The shabby reporting, deliberate or not, is of great concern.

No mention of the Penn State investigation into Michael Mann’s work? The fact that Climategate helped to bring down the leader of the opposition in Australia? US Senator James Inhofe’s call for an investigation? The UK Met office’s review of 160 years of data? The weaknesses in the software? It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that the really damning evidence is in the computer code, not the emails. No journalist who had done any research into this story could have missed that. Programmers around the world have been pulling the code apart, although they are handicapped by the implicated scientists’ refusal to release details of how they did their work and reached their conclusions. What about the key roles played by two Canadian researchers in challenging the flawed conclusions of the scientists? The vast sums of money from governments and corporations to support climate research that came under the control of the scientists now on leave or under suspension? The failures of this story go on and on. There has been better information and better leads to information in the online comments section of this newspaper and other outlets for two weeks now. The more I look at how the Globe and Mail has covered this story, the more convinced I become that it has lost any sense of professional obligation.