For Virginians with long memories, Wikipedia sounds the ring of truth when it declares that the editors of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the state’s newspaper of record, “tend to be politically conservative, leading the paper to frequently endorse candidates of the Republican Party.”
So it’s all the more notable that these editors recently wrote, “Conservatives' pigheaded resistance to scientific consensus looks remarkably like the American left's denial of Soviet atrocities once upon a time: They don't want it to be true, therefore it isn't.'
Under the headline “Climate Science: The Mann Act” , the editorial called for Virginia’s Republican attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, to do “the decent thing” and drop his legal inquiry into past climate research by Michael Mann, “apologize to Mann and then apologize to the taxpayers.”
The editors charge that “Cuccinelli is stretching the state's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act to allege that Mann, a former UVa employee, obtained grants under false pretenses.” Republicans, they write, have “taken to arguing backward from an ideological conclusion — government regulation is bad — to a factual finding: therefore, climate change isn't happening. And anyone who says so must be lying.”
The editorial ends this way:
[T]he denialist camp ... employs two sharply divergent standards: Anything that undermines the case for concern about climate change — such as the recent investigation of a scientist who had made startling claims about polar bears — immediately becomes ironclad proof that the whole notion is a scam, but even the strongest evidence supporting climate change is and always will be pure speculation. It is a shame to watch Cuccinelli — who has a background in engineering and a keen mind — encourage rather than correct such shoddy thinking.
The editorial has drawn a letter of protest from an official of the Heartland Institute. To that letter the editors appended this: 'Editor's note: Climate scientist Michael Mann's tenure at the University of Virginia ended in 2005; the research projects for which Mann received grants while at U.Va. were all completed by 2006.'
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for 'Science and the media.' He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
