Justin Gillis, who has taken over the lead reporting duties on climate change from Andrew Revkin at the New York Times, might want to consider tightrope walking in his next life.
Consider his exquisitely nuanced recapitulation of an on-line controversy involving a climate change denier named Alec Rawls, who dismisses the entire upcoming fifth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the basis of a single ambiguous sentence.
Mr. Rawls found this to be a “game-changing” acknowledgement that, yes, earthly climate must be influenced by cosmic rays. Indeed, in his manifesto leaking the document, he called this sentence “an astounding bit of honesty, a killing admission that completely undercuts the main premise and the main conclusion of the full report, revealing the fundamental dishonesty of the whole.”
Well.
Looking at the full report, I have to wonder if Mr. Rawls just stopped reading when he got to that sentence. Because what follows is a lengthy discussion of the science to date regarding cosmic rays and climate, one that points out the intriguing results suggesting a possible connection, but also points out that many of those studies cannot be reproduced by other scientists, that many of the supposed correlations are weak, and so forth.
The Flying Wallendas couldn't walk that line any better.
