Global Warming

Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal released articles today discussing the U.N. Climate Panel's newest report on global warming. The two articles are good examples of how completely different points can come out of one event. WSJ focused on the fact that the report says "humans are extremely likely" behind global warming, while the NYT looks more at the ceiling the report puts on global emissions and the difficulties behind getting governments to change emission standards.

The NYT also devotes much more space to the topic: two full pages online. WSJ gives just one page.

The writing of each piece was completely different as well. The WSJ article was easier to read while the NYT article was a little more confusing. Both articles referred to the report given back in 2007 by the same panel, but only the WSJ compared the reports side by side, making it easy to understand the specific change and why it is important. The WSJ also made it clear that the panel still was uncertain on many factors, like how the cooling of the Pacific Ocean and the dozen volcano eruptions since 2005 played into the cause of global warming. The NYT article only emphasized the uncertainty the panel had when discussing the rate at which the ocean will rise, and the likelihood that plants and animals will be driven to extinction.

The WSJ article left room to question how effective the panel has been at estimating the rate of global warming, and...how do they know?



The NYT article went in an interesting direction by looking at the opposition: the “climate skeptics” or “climate doubters” as they called them. A side point to consider: did the author come up with these silly terms to make the “doubters” seem as silly as the name? The choice of wording is important. This article also discussed the “cautious choices in their assessment of scientific evidence.” They state that the panel estimated the rise in sea level could be 3 feet by the end of the century, throwing out estimates that lean toward 5 feet. Why? Another passage that confuses:

               “Similarly, the authors went out of their way to include recent papers
                suggesting that the earth might be less sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions
                than previously thought, even though serious questions have been raised
                about the validity of those estimates.”

This isn’t discussed for the rest of the article, though this could be made into a report all its own. Where did this controversy spring up, and why aren’t they discussing it more? Why did the WSJ avoid this statement all together?

Unfortunately, when talking about President Obama’s new, and costly, rules over coal-burning plants, the NYT states, “the president’s Republican opponents have accused him of waging a ‘war on coal.’” If it was a republican representative that spoke those words, the NYT should have stated so. By lumping every one against the new rules into the Republican Party, this runs the risk of largely misrepresenting the opponents. As another side note,  too many news outlets are doing this: making it seem like the citizens of the United States only have two points of view: the Republican or the Democrat view. If you pay attention to the news, party lines are splitting more and more, making it much harder to define the ‘values’ of either party. Perhaps because people aren’t fitting into the cookie cutter lines as well as they used to. Either way, the NYT should be more careful with word choice.