ABC News Exposes Denial Machine Guru

Global warming denialism has finally made it -- to ABC World News with Charles Gibson. You'd think the denial machine would be happy, but all you'll find is sour grapes. "Hit piece" and "smear" they're calling it, and this from an outfit called Business and Media Institute:

ABC pulls no punches in dismissing the work of physicist Fred Singer as 'fraudulent nonsense.'

If you couldn't tell, it was a complaint. And it wasn't ABC that dismissed Singer's work as 'fraudulent nonsense." It was the scientific community, with reporter Dan Harris merely pointing out the obvious about Singer's denialism:

There are so many scientists that disagree with what your saying. The IPCC, NASA, NOAA, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society. We're talking about scientists all over the globe.

Singer merely replies that they're wrong, and the denialists who are leaping to Singer's defense cite his credentials: a degree in electrical engineering from Ohio State University and a PhD in Physics from Princeton University. They do not clarify how that qualifies him to be an expert on climate change, and they're lucky ABC didn't play it for a laugh line.

Kert Davies of Greenpeace summed up Singer's legacy on the broadcast quite succinctly:

"That's how people will remember Fred Singer, as someone who tried to slow down the reaction to global warming," Davies said. "And in the end that is going to cost lost lives, lost species and major economic damage around the world."

Davies ought to know. He's been battling denialists for a decade, almost singlehandedly until recently. His magnum opus, a web site called exxonsecrets, maps the web of relationships inside the denialist machine.

Now that ABC has broken the ice -- and Davies has gotten long overdue air time -- will other media follow suit?

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