Watching Sunday night's Fox News Channel special "Global Warming: The Debate Continues", it struck me that while there will undoubtedly be hue and cry from the Al "Apocalypse" Gore crowd for this balanced, calm look at the facts behind global warming, there's a very simple reason Fox News does such a great job with its global warming investigations and with its science reporting in general. It's because journalism--in its purest form--and science both spring from the same school of hard fact. Science, like unbiased reporting, is made from the building blocks of immutability. The boiling point of hydrogen is -252.87 °C; a DNA molecule consists of two strands of nucleotides; Senator John Doe said "ABC" in an interview yesterday. There's no room for bias in reporting, just as there's no way to spin the atomic mass of platinum. Facts are what they are.
It's also worth noting what prominent, incredibly smart "The Skeptical Environmentalist" author and self-described former "worried member of Greenpeace" Bjorn Lomborg was given the opportunity to say on the special last night:
"I used to be a worried member of Greenpeace, thinking everything was coming to an end...but the data, the facts, tell you that many, many things [in the environment] are moving in the right direction. There are many other problems [besides global warming]...there are three million people dying of HIV/AIDS every year, there are millions of people dying from malnutrition, from malaria, from lack of access to free trade, lack of access to clean drinking water...to put it bluntly, the Kyoto Protocol [on climate change] is going to cost $150 billion per year and do very little good. The UN actually estimates that for half that amount, $75 billion, we could solve all basic problems in the world. We could give clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care, and education to every single human being on the planet. Do we want to spend twice that amount of money doing very little good, or do we want to spend half that money and do an enormous amount of good, right now?"
No matter how you feel about what Lomborg says, it's undeniable that a) FNC is letting viewers decide for themselves what to think about global warming and about the politics of the global environment and b) Lomborg is nobody's shill. And check out the video of a FNC producer's interview on the science behind global warming with a deeply non-hysterical MIT scientist--and MIT scientists aren't exactly either political or dumb--here. Again, all science is, essentially, unbiased reporting--no wonder FNC covers it so well.
