Scientific American: Fiddling While the Planet Burns

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Scientific American: Fiddling While the Planet Burns

Will the Wall Street Journal's editorial writers accept a challenge to learn the truth about the science of global climate change?

I don't believe for a second that the Wall Street Journal's editorial board are ignorant here. I think they are, at best, in amazing denial, at worst, liars.

The WSJ's adoration of Bjorn Lomborg, and later their coverage blackout of Lomborg's censure by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (not one syllable in the WSJ) cost them my subscription some time back.

Reporters for the Wall Street Journal routinely distance themselves from the editorial page. Many of the paper's own reporters laugh or cringe at the anti-scientific posture of the editorials, and advise the rest of us simply not to read them. Nevertheless, the consequences of those editorials are significant. The Wall Street Journal is the most widely read business paper in the world. Its influence is extensive. Yet it gets a free pass on editorial irresponsibility.

As a neighbor to the paper at Columbia University, the Earth Institute has repeatedly invited the editorial team to meet with leading climate scientists. I've offered to organize such a meeting in any way that the editorial board would like. On many occasions, the news editors have eagerly accepted, but the editorial writers have remained safe in their splendid isolation.

Let me make the invitation once again. Many of the world's leading climate scientists are prepared to meet with the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, and to include in that meeting any climate-skeptic scientists that that the Journal editorial board would like to invite. The board owes it to the rest of us to make the effort to their own "open-minded search for scientific knowledge." If only for the sake of their own sweltering hometown, it's time they accept the invitation.

Good luck.