Headlines are always the worst climate case story

I had hoped that the Christian Science Monitor would be the exception to the rule, but the corruption of journalism in pursuit of global warming headlines seem to affect them just as much. They picked up the AP story on the "ecodisaster" of Katrina and subheaded it The hurricane destroyed or damaged about 320 million trees across the South. The story then states that the 100 million metric tons of greenhouse gases produced by all this stuff rotting exceeds the amount by which forests across America take in carbon in the course of a year.

The comparison with annual carbon uptake by all forests seems a stretch. The hundred megaton figure is within shouting distance of estimates of CO2 from forest fires, which surely destroy a small percentage of the trees in the country or we wouldn't have a forest industry.

But the main point, regarding the quality of journalism, is that in the second half of the article, the authors note that respectable forestry people, living in the area, think the figures are grossly inflated. Experts at the Mississippi Institute for Forest Inventory conducted a scientific survey, taking random samples of woodlots, and concluded that the loss was perhaps a fifth of what the UNH and Tulane research showed from satellite imagery. Most of us would tend to believe what people can see up close rather than computer estimates based on images from hundreds of miles away.

CSM, unfortunately, chose to use the higher figure and present it as authoritative in the subhead. In a perfect world, everyone would read the whole article and could form their own opinions, but in practice, many readers don't get past the head and subhead, or at most the first paragraph or two. So when those create a completely unbalanced picture, it is very misleading. I had hoped for more from this newspaper.