TPM yanks post calling for death to global warming deniers, but not fast enough

By the time Talking Points Memo yanked a reader blog yesterday calling for global warming skeptics to be jailed or executed, that language had made the rounds of a right-wing blog network in what they call a “Shock Call to Action.” The initiator of the alert was Marc Morano of Climate Depot (a project of the Committee for a Conservative Tomorrow). When he wrote about the rant, he didn’t distinguish the offending reader blog at TPMCafe from the professional blogs at Talking Points Memo’s main site. He wrote,
A public appeal has been made by an influential website asking, ‘At what point do we execute global warming deniers.’ The appeal appeared on Talking Points Memo, an often cited website that helps set the agenda for the political Left in the U.S.”
Within hours, Morano’s alert appeared on almost 400 other Web sites. By afternoon it reached some right-bent publications of broader circulation, such as the Canada Free Press and the Washington Examiner. Mark Tapscott, the Examiner’s editorial page editor, used the incident as evidence that the left is more prone to hatred and violence than the right, and he did not pass on the opportunity to evoke Adolph Hitler:
With possible exceptions from South and Central America, violence from the Right against political opponents tends to be sporadic, isolated and, most crucially, not justified as a matter of ideological consistency. The “enemies of the people” trope has been deservedly and uniquely associated with the Left since Lenin and the communist revolution in Russia in 1917, and even before that with the Revolution in France.
Virtually without fail, it is regimes of the Left that create, as a matter of policy, horrors like Lenin’s Red Terror, the Gulags of Siberia, and Stalin’s death lists, as well as the Killing Fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the “re-education camps” of Mao’s China, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Nam and Kim il-Sung’s North Korea, the furnaces of Hitler’s National Socialism, Castro’s death camps, and on and on and on.
Needless to say, not much in this exchange will help cool the planet. But it does bring us to an important question: short of jailing and executing the speakers, what’s the best way for media to handle global warming speech, on both sides, that undermines science and progress?
The anonymous TPM reader/blogger, who calls himself The Insolent Braggart, put the question this way:
So when the right wing fucktards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events – how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn’t we start punishing them now?
He might have started down the road toward a useful thought about perilous timing–once global warming becomes too obvious to deny, it will be too late to prevent–but he veered into an arrogant thought about punishment, and in the end the Braggart did as much harm as any fucktard. Maybe more.
So now we’re in the realm of measuring the harm of comments on both sides, but we have to leave room for legitimate scientific skepticism.
Just as Talking Points Memo recognized the importance of yanking the Insolent Braggart’s destructive rant, should journalists omit destructive skepticism, which they sometimes parrot out of thoughtless obligation to technical balance? If so, they have to filter the sound skepticism from the hot air.
Curtis Brainard covers environmental journalists for the Columbia Journalism Review. In a column devoted to making space for skeptics, he goes over some egregious missteps (George Will) and more subtle ones (The New York Times profile of Freeman Dyson) journalists have made while handling skepticism, and he weighs the rhetoric on both sides. A viable strategy crystallizes around a comment by Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate modeler and blogger for RealClimate, where climate scientists blog. Schmidt speaks both to the importance of skepticism and the importance of filtering it:
Skepticism is the life blood of science – without it, no progress would ever have been made nor will be made in the future. But people indulging in pot shots against the ‘climate consensus’ based on no knowledge of the actual science are not ’skeptics’ in any real sense. It is very reminiscent of the Monty Python argument sketch – true argument is not simply contradiction.
Should stories about global warming only quote leading climate scientists? Should they omit the ill-informed, the flakey, the extreme point of view as impediments to the effort to halt lethal warming? And should exceptions then be made for ill-informed, flaky, extreme members of Congress? Or, with time running out and Earth in the Balance, do we just let free speech ring and hope for the best?