I was impressed by the case made in An Inconvenient Truth. The mounting evidence of melting polar ice caps and the projected images of coastal flooding was the most frightening aspect.

And Gore kept qualifying his warnings with statements like “even in a best case scenario…” He really slammed the climate change sceptics.

This is just more of the same stuff that gets Roger in trouble with the self-same science community.

Your obsession with Roger’s comment seems frankly a little bizarre, and a classic case study for the “Pielke watch” feature over at Inkstain.

I read him to be saying something that I find completely uncontroversial – that Al Gore has become a polarizing figure in this scientized debate.

I think the paper you are referring to must be the one he delivered at a GSA conference last year — “Causes of Abrupt Global Climate Changes and Global Warming: Predictions for the Coming Century.” In it, he does seem to be arguing that solar cycles are more important than CO2 in influencing climate shifts during the 20th century, and he predicts a cooling from 2006 to 2035. That certainly puts him in a small minority of climate scientists.

Is he a credible scientist? It seems so. Are his ideas legitimate? Well, his peers seem to think so, since they accept his papers for presentation at conferences. Is he right? I’m not a scientist, so that’s not for me to say. All I can say, as a journalist, is that his ideas on this subject seem to lie outside the mainstream of scientific thought at the moment.

But the real issue is how Broad used him in his story. And I will just reiterate what I’ve been saying all along, and what many other critics of the story have been saying: Broad misleads his readers into thinking that the sources he uses to debunk Gore’s presentation are centrists on the climate change issue. Most if not all very clearly are not.

So a question for you: Under what circumstances would it be okay to quote a credible scientist like Easterbrook on climate change? A more pointed way of asking it: Should we journalists ignore scientists whose ideas fall outside the mainstream on a question like climate change?

My opinion: We should report credible, peer reviewed science that falls outside the consensus, because it is always possible that the consensus is wrong. On many scientific issues, it frequently has turned out to be wrong. I don’t think that’s going to be the case with the overall picture of climate change. But the devil is in the details, and many of those details are still the subject of great uncertainty.

We certainly should avoid falling victim to false balance in our stories. And we must make sure readers understand where our sources sit before we tell them where they stand. In other words, if a scientist sits with a small band of skeptics, that has to be clear.

Broad seems to be on a false balance campaign. And he misled his readers about where his sources sit.

– Tom