18 February 2014

David Gregory at Meet The Press Stops The Ridiculous

Posted by Dan Satterfield

More about this from climate scientist Simon Donner. Click the image which is from the IPCC.

More about this from climate scientist Simon Donner. Click the image which is from the IPCC.

I wasn’t the only one who was very critical of NBC’s Meet The Press program last Sunday, but there was a bright spot. David Gregory stopped his guest cold when she started making totally incorrect statements about climate science. No, not Dr. Heidi Cullen (who is an expert), but the other guest (a politician) who knows nothing about the subject (except perhaps that it’s inconvenient to her political world-view). This begs the question of why Meet The Press didn’t put a panel together in the first place about how we deal with it. That IS a valid political question.

It’s about time that journalists tell their politician guests who start throwing out this denier junk, that if they have a problem with all that science, they should submit a paper showing where all those scientists got it wrong to a peer-reviewed journal. That’s how science works, and in essence David Gregory did just that. Several newspapers have actually already begun refusing to print the silly claims they get from the conspiracy theory crowd.

In related news, CBS did an interview with Dr. Jennifer Francis who kindly accepted our invitation to speak at our Station Science Session at the AMS Broadcast Conference last June in Nashville.

By the way, the Northern Hemisphere had its 3rd warmest January on record according to NASA and this is while most of the heat over the past decade has actually been going into the Ocean. Climate scientists Simon Donner has a good summary on his blog MARIBO.