Tuesday, January 26, 2010

UN scientist refutes Daily Mail claim he said Himalayan glacier error was politically motivated

From Climate Progress:

MEMO TO MEDIA:  Please start doing some damn journalism — like placing a simple phone call to a primary source.   A great many “newspapers” like the Daily Mail are no more reliable than the websites of the anti-science disinformers, like the thoroughly discredited ClimateDepot of Marc Morano.

In an exclusive interview  — “exclusive” in the sense that many of the people smearing Dr. Murari Lal haven’t bothered to ask him whether the original story was accurate — Dr. Lal asserts that the “most vilest allegations” in the Daily Mail story are utterly false. …

“Journalism is not peer review.”  Apparently journalism isn’t much more than the children’s game of telephone these days.  Certainly it doesn’t seem to involve the use of a real telephone.

Lal’s phone number is easy to find online, and I called him myself, even though it was after midnight in India (I hoped he was on travel), but he answered it immediately.

He said these were “the most vilest allegations” and denied that he ever made such assertions.  He said “I didn’t put it [the 2035 claim] in to impress policymakers….  We reported the facts about science as we knew them and as was available in the literature.” …

EXCLUSIVE: UN scientist refutes Daily Mail claim he said Himalayan glacier error was politically motivated - "We reported the facts about science as we knew them.... We were not trying to oversell the science.... The fact is the IPCC has been very conservative."

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