This has been bubbling inside me for quite some time now. Maybe it started some years back when Dr. Michael Mann, the hockey stick guy, was on a TV panel show and someone suggested that climate affairs were so bad that it made her/him want to cry. As if on cue, Mann generated crocodile tears, pretending to lament the situation of our climate. It made me want to puke.
But I have a lot of impressions of Mann … perhaps foremost, that while his so-called Hockey Stick is pseudoscience at best, it is very detailed work that requires a great deal of intelligence and effort, even if he was probably exaggerating his case, perhaps even engaging in creative accounting. Steve McIntyre, the Canadian mining engineer who took apart the stick piece by piece, had to devote tremendous effort to replicate Mann’s efforts, not easily dissembled and beyond the reach of us mere mortals. What we found was that tree rings are a complicated science, and without a strong working knowledge of statistics cannot be assembled in a way that sends a “temperature signal” from the past to the present.
Have you ever seen one of these dramatic courtroom presentations where, upon leaving the courthouse, the lawyers and defendants are swarmed by journalists and cameras? I can’t be sure, but I do not think that happens in real life. Journalists are kept not on leashes, but rather choke chains. As Ben Bagdakian (1920-2016) made clear in his book , The Media Monopoly (1983), young journalists are trained to rein in their curiosity, to not get emotionally involved, to get a quote from both sides and move on. TV drama would have them off the leash looking for stories, challenging powerful people, and in general, being a pain in the ass to the comfortable … doing their job. Ain’t so. Ain’t done. I know this from my own life experiences … journalists do not know how to do the one thing that one would think was their calling … to search for truth.
Piece of Mindful 