Topic: Accuracy in Media
Climate denier Alan Caruba has a lengthy history of misleading about global warming. He keeps it up in a couple recent columns posted at Accuracy in Media.
In a Feb. 14 column, Caruba blames "the global warming hoax" for an alleged insufficiency of electricity in Europe as it deals with unusually cold temperatures because, he claims, countries have been "spending billions for wind power when they should have been building coal-fired and other sources of energy to heat their homes and businesses." Caruba goes on to note how "Serbia has started implementing power cuts in a desperate bid to stave off the collapse of its national grid as the country suffers the effects of days of freezing temperatures."
In fact, the UK Telegraph article from which Caruba pulled the Serbia story makes no mention of "wind power" -- in fact, it states that "Temperatures as low as -30C have sent demand soaring but also interrupted coal production, restricting supplies to Serbia's coal-fired power stations."
Indeed, nowhere in Caruba's article does he provide any evidence that power sources that aren't coal- or oil-based have any responsibility whatsoever for deaths from extreme cold.
In a Feb. 16 column, Caruba ranted about the release of documents from the conservative Heartland Institute, revealing its strategies to promote global warming denialism:
This week, a major smear campaign against the Institute erupted as the result of an act of deception and thievery that may well result in criminal charges against its as yet unknown perpetrator.
The President of the Institute, Joe Bast, immediately informed its supporters, directors, donors and friends that someone pretending to be a board member had sent Heartland an email claiming to be a director and asking that documents regarding a January board meeting be re-sent.
A clever ruse, but the result was that elements of the confidential documents were then posted on a number of so-called climate blogs and from there to various members of the media who, with the exception of The Guardian, took no steps whatever to verify the authenticity of the documents, some of which Heartland says were either a concoction of lies or altered to convey inaccurate information.
By contrast, Caruba describes the release of stolen emails from climate researchers connected to East Anglia University as nothing but a "leak." Caruba obviously had no moral qualms over that deception and thievery -- after all, those documents "revealed the extent of their efforts to spread the hoax and to suppress any expression of doubt regarding it." (Except that they didn't.) To our knowledge, Caruba has never demanded that "criminal charges" be filed against the "as yet unknown perpetrator" who stole the East Anglia emails.
Further, the Heartland Institute itself effectively confirmed the authenticity of the documents by complaining that they were "stolen." Caruba offers no evidence that he or anyone else attempted to verify the authenticity of the stolen East Anglia emails before writing about them.
Double standard? Obviously. But Caruba has not exactly been known for his honesty in his denier activism.
