Tuesday, August 16, 2005

If I Wanted The National Post...

I'd buy the National Post, dammit.

Margaret Wente, in her continuing quest to prove herself an intellectual and moral midget, has written a column celebrating "The collapse of the climate 'consensus'". This of course follows closely on the heels of her "Mass transit is for the darkies" column last week. Wente apparently doesn't have the journalistic ability God gave a chimp, because I'm pretty sure for enough bananas I could teach a chimp to use Google.

The star of Wente's big wet kiss to the fossil fuel industries in one Dr. Madhav Khandekar. From one interview with one meteorologist, Wente spins a several-hundred word column on how "the consensus [on climate change] is a myth." Even Dr. Khandekar could tell Ms. Wente that one data point doesn't make a trend. (By the way, Ms. Wente, a meteorologist is not the same as a climatologist, just like you aren't the same as an honest journalist.) But what about Dr. Khandekar? Ah, this is where Google comes in.

I would reccomend that, any time you see the sentence "[professor/scientist/shill] says global warming is a myth" you take the name of said expert, and punch it in to Google. When you punch in Madhav Khandekar, the #3 result brings you to a website called ExxonSecrets, which documents the funding Exxon has given to various anti-environmental groups. Surprise, surprise, Madhav Khandekar has spoken at a conference funded indirectly by Exxon. I wonder exactly how much he was paid for that gig?

Now, I don't think Dr. Khandekar is being bribed to sell bad science to the public. Like any whore, he's just getting paid for what comes naturally.

Ms. Wente, on the other hand, should be a bit more credulous when it comes to supposed experts on climate change. At the very least, she should a) investigate whether Dr. Khandekar has accepted any money from Exxon or groups funded by Exxon, and b) inform her readers of his potential bias. After all, her column occupies prime real estate in the country's largest newspaper.

Of course, that would require Ms. Wente to have some sense. Any sense whatsoever. And the evidence increasingly supports the hypothesis that Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail is a twit.

Now that's what I call a consensus.

(As for the supposed "refutations" of climate change in the column itself, they're all so old and tired that all I will say is, if you're actually swayed by anything in that piece of trash, read this.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just wanted to say thanks: her columns have been getting on my nerves in a severe way for years, and it was a pleasure to see her getting thrashed here.

Anonymous said...

This is an old post, just flipping through views on the tiresome Ms. Wente. To say the woman is an Empress with no Clothes is to be charitable. Sometimes I read her Globe and Mail columns just to laugh at her ridiculous, ill-considered "insights",but sometimes she pisses me off. I don't see why she, Rachel Marsden and Ann Coulter are still carrying on with this fanatasy that they're not one and the same person, manufactured in an Exxon cloning lab deep beneath the Rocky Mts.