The Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked a dozen of Georgia’s “top elected officials and the director of the agency tasked with the state’s environment whether they believe the globe is warming, and whether they think pollution caused by human activity is a cause.” A 2 January front-page AJC article reports that of those who responded, “some said they’re not convinced the climate is changing; others said it’s not their problem; yet others said it’s happening but humans aren’t necessarily a cause,” and that none “voiced acceptance of proposed federal mandates that would reduce the nation’s output of greenhouse gasses.”
Implicitly, the article says a lot about present journalistic practice concerning what the prominent climate scientists at the blog RealClimate, just to cite one example, have condemned as “the false objectivity of ‘balance.’” In 2005 they declared themselves “disappointed with the tendency for some journalistic outlets to favor so-called ‘balance’ over accuracy in their treatment of politically-controversial scientific issues such as global climate change.” They asserted that while “giving equal coverage to two opposing sides may seem appropriate in political discourse, it is manifestly inappropriate in discussions of science, where objective truths exist.”
But that was a decade ago. Back then, the RealClimate scientists didn’t say how the AJC should handle climate-consensus scoffing by key Georgia leaders in 2015.
The newspaper stipulates near the top that the “vast majority of climate scientists agree that the answer to each of those questions is yes, although some are more emphatic than others.” But the article then adds what its front-page subhead emphasizes: “Skeptics ascribe the consensus to researchers’ desire to keep the grant pipeline flowing.”
The article reports that Georgia’s Republican US senator-elect David Perdue didn’t answer, but that a campaign press release had labeled his opponent’s call for prompt action on climate change a “job-killing” stance. It also reports that Georgia’s Republican senator Johnny Isakson didn’t answer directly but said he believes “it is in our nation’s geopolitical and security interests to develop reduced emissions technologies so that we stop purchasing energy from dictatorial regimes.”
Republican Georgia congressman Rick Allen “vehemently rejected the idea that warming is an established fact,” asserting in writing that the “science is definitely NOT settled.” (The capital letters are the congressman’s.) Calling to mind the false-balance question, he reportedly also asserted, “Limiting debate to one side is not the same as being conclusive.”
His Republican congressional colleague Barry Loudermilk is quoted too: “I believe that climate change is a function of nature; the climate has been changing as long as the Earth has existed,” he said. “We absolutely should be good stewards of the planet, and I am very much opposed to reckless pollution and disregard for the environment, but I also know that some politicians and bureaucrats believe in whatever theory gives them an opportunity to take money from the energy sector and spend it themselves in the name of saving the planet.”
The AJC reports that the Georgia legislature’s Republican speaker, David Ralston, wrote, “While some are eager to proclaim that human-caused climate change is ‘settled science,’ there are many others who remain skeptical.”
The state’s governor reportedly dodged:
Georgia’s top official deferred to leaders in Washington. “This is more of a national and international policy issue,” said Brian Robinson, a spokesman for Gov. Nathan Deal, who appoints the board responsible for Georgia’s environmental stewardship. “Not one where we should or would weigh in.”
The article includes the view of state legislator Jack Murphy, a Republican “who chairs the Senate Regulated Industries and Utilities Committee and sits on the powerful Rules and Appropriations committees,” and who is “skeptical” that global temperatures are rising:
“I still haven’t seen anything that’s positive proof,” Murphy said. “Until I do, I’m going to have to say, well, if it is changing, it’s changing at such a minute stage that I don’t know what the long term effects are going to be.”
Among the utilities overseen by the panel Murphy chairs are Georgia Power and its parent company, Southern Company, which feel the pinch when the government tightens pollution rules. They, their political committees and their employees donated more than $115,000 to Gov. Deal, Speaker Ralston and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle in the last four years.
The article also notes some use of the “I’m not a scientist” answer, not only from Cagle but from others:
“You know, I’m not a scientist,” said Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Steve Gooch. “So I have to base my decision making on information that I get from other people, so I guess it’s hard for me to say for sure.”
However, he added, “I think we have a duty as citizens to protect Mother Earth and try to pass it on to our next generation as good as or better than we found it.” He thinks we’re on the right course to do that, he said, without federal interference.
His counterpart in the House, Transportation Chairman Jay Roberts, a Republican of Ocilla, was on the same page.
“First of all, naturally, I’m not a scientist, but in my opinion we’re going through cycles like we have throughout history,” Roberts said. He recalled in his own childhood winter holidays much warmer than those now. If so many climate scientists say the earth is warming overall, he said, that may be because they know that’s how they’ll keep getting money for research.
The chair of the House Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee, Don Parsons, a Republican of Marietta, also remains unconvinced. “As far as global warming, I have read so many different things, so many different reports from different scientific studies that come to different conclusions, I don’t know,” Parsons said.
“I’m not one of those people who just sits and rejects the idea, but I’m just not convinced.”
In both the main text and a sidebar, the AJC emphasizes the view of Judith Curry, an Earth sciences professor at Georgia Tech well known for differing with colleagues who join the overall scientific consensus:
“Everybody agrees that humans are contributing to warming,” Curry said in an interview with the AJC.
That said, she does differ in important ways with scientists who urge immediate action to counteract the Earth’s warming trend. She thinks the earth is warming at a slower rate than computer models predict, and she’s not at all sure that man-made pollution is the primary cause. She differs with many of her colleagues on the meaning of a current pause in surface temperature warming.
She thinks fostering new energy technologies to replace fossil fuels is wise, but that weaning us from carbon-based fuels is a project for the long term. Most jarring for her colleagues, she doesn’t think climate change is an emergency. She loathes false certainty.
Curry has written about the AJC piece in her blog.
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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. 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.
