Some people (like Noam Chomsky) dismissed the NYT as a corporate pawn long ago. I have to admit I read it daily and still take it seriously. However, the piece on Al Gore today is such a hack job that I'm questioning my own naivete. They appear to be going out of their way to confuse the issue and undermine Gore's credibility. I won't go into all the details -- RealClimate and Grist do a good job that. But here's the Letter to the Editor that I sent to the Times:

To the editors,

If you're going to weigh in on Al Gore's scientific accuracy, for heaven's sake, get your facts right. William Broad's March 13 article "From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype" repeats a naive error that's being used to undermine Gore's credibility and further confuse the public.

Broad states that the latest IPCC report has lowered its estimate of future sea level rise, apparently exposing Gore as a "shrill alarmist". This is dead wrong. The reason for the lower estimate is that the IPCC report now excludes the full effects of ice sheet melting -- because we don't understand it well enough. And that's mainly because Greenland is melting faster than anyone had expected. What they're saying is not, "Sea level rise is going to be less than we thought." They're saying, "We just can't predict what the ice sheets are going to do."

Still think that, as Broad bizarrely concludes, the IPCC portrays climate change as a "slow-motion process"? The IPCC estimates that under a business-as-usual scenario global temperature will rise over 7 degrees F by 2100. That's more than half a degree per decade.

Phil Mitchell
Founder, 2People.org citizen's network for climate action