Too much climate change?

I was intrigued by the headline that cropped up on the feed on my blog: "There's too much climate change..." I had to click on the link to see what the heck was going on.

In fact the headline was truncated to fit. It actually read "There's too much climate change denial on the BBC." http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/21/bbc_science_report/

This fits into an idea I had a while ago, before I started the blog, about one of the fundamental reasons we can't move forward into policy changes to ameliorate the climate change problem. The paradigm of journalism is to seek contrary points of view. I learned this forty years ago when I was a reporter covering London Ontario city council for a small community magazine. Every story has two sides. The reporter has to find the other side.

In those days, the other side was often obscure. In order to put forward our left-wing agenda, we had to look far and wide to find someone who could give an alternative point of view to the nice conservative people running city hall. And we did.

It's no different today on Fox News or the BBC. For every climate change story there needs to be a climate change denier. But it's not hard to find one, because unlike our socialist hordes in the 70s, these contrarians are well funded and ubiquitous. So the sense for the average reader is that there is a real controversy about the reality of climate change. People believe what they want to believe and what makes them feel more comfortable in their current state. Therefore the current model of journalism does not serve us well in a time of crisis when decisive action is needed.

Reporters should be covering a story and taking a stand. Giving a voice to the idiots who spout denial nonsense is not in the public interest. It's panic time folks! The time for debate is over.