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Yesterday on "60 Minutes," Scott Pelley offered up the latest in his series of stories about global warming. You can watch the story, much of which was filmed in Antarctica, by clicking on the video box.

Pelley has spoken with me twice about his coverage of global warming, and in a wide-ranging interview posted March 22, I asked him what he thinks "about the fact that James Inhofe, who until recently chaired the Environment and Public Works Committee, has cited your work as one of the prime examples of the media hyping global warming?"

Here is Pelley's reply:

That interview I did with you has become somewhat famous around Washington, apparently. First of all, let me say I am not familiar with what Senator Inhofe has said about me specifically, although I am aware that he brought my work up on the floor of the Senate. I think it's important to know that Senator Inhofe is a very careful and capable representative of the state of Oklahoma, which is where my family is from. And one thing Senator Inhofe knows is his constituents. And a lot of his constituents are honorably employed by the oil industry and companies that serve the oil industry. There's nothing wrong with that. And there's nothing wrong with him being an advocate for those constituents.

I think Senator Inhofe comes at this from a particular viewpoint, and that is that petroleum products should not be blamed on global warming. The science, however, is overwhelmingly on the other side of the question. The recent international conference on global warming, which was sponsored by the United States, concluded with 90 percent certainty – which is all you can get a scientist to say – that human activity, i.e. greenhouse gasses, particularly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, is the principle driver of the warming trend that we have seen over the last several years.

And there is no debate any longer that there is a warming trend. I've just come back from Antarctica a few weeks ago, where we were shooting a story, and there are manifest, obvious changes down at the bottom of the earth that the earth is warming.

Conservative media bias site Newsbusters is calling Pelley's latest report "alarmist." Wrote Justin McCarthy, sarcastically: "Apparently, when watching a glacier recede, one can jump to the conclusion that SUV driving soccer moms are causing it."

"There are many reasons [why political leaders have not yet taken action on global warming], but one of the principal reasons in my view is more than half of the mainstream media have rejected the scientific consensus implicitly — and I say 'rejected,' perhaps it's the wrong word. They have failed to report that it is the consensus and instead have chosen … balance as bias."

--Al Gore, speaking to a group of national media ethicists.

One of the reasons global warming is such a compelling topic is that it exists at the intersection of politics, business, and the environment, a fact made abundantly clear by three major stories that have broken this week. The first story concerns the release of a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "a top panel of international scientists," claiming that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal" and that the warming has "very likely" been caused by man. The second is news about an oil company: record profits of $39.5 billion, or about $4.5 million per hour, for ExxonMobil in 2006. And the third story, from the Guardian, is the one that has the blogosphere heating up:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

About a month ago, the news broke that according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, "ExxonMobil Corp. gave $16 million to 43 ideological groups between 1998 and 2005 in an effort to mislead the public by discrediting the science behind global warming."

The latest news has liberal blogger Kevin Drum showing off his sarcastic side. "Seriously? These guys made $39.5 billion but were willing to pay scientists only ten grand each to whore themselves out writing reports and op-eds pretending there's some kind of serious doubt about the reality of human-induced global warming? Even though these scientists have kids to feed?," writes Drum. "That's insulting. For this level of simpering I recommend holding out for at least $50,000."

The flurry of warming news brings to mind Scott Pelley's comments to us after his Feb. 2006 piece on global warming, which largely excluded the perspective of global warming skeptics.

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From Newsbusters:

2006 will go down as the year that the media universally tried to sell America on the unproven theory that man-made global warming is destroying the planet, and will cause our imminent doom. Part of this hysteria includes fallacious assertions by all involved that there is a scientific consensus regarding these dire predictions.

From CBSNews.com:

Two private advocacy groups told a congressional hearing Tuesday that climate scientists at seven government agencies say they have been subjected to political pressure aimed at downplaying the threat of global warming.

Read both pieces and come to your own conclusions. If you're still not sure where you stand on all this, dive into our past posts – we've written about global warming coverage more times than I can count. (You might want to start here, here or here.)

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Andrew Revkin of the New York Times writes that a third front has opened in the global warming debate, a topic Public Eye readers will recognize as one of our longtime obsessions. The "usually invisible middle," it seems, has become increasingly frustrated with the debate between the two traditional sides (which see warming as either "a human-caused catastrophe or a hoax") and is now making its voice heard. Those in this new camp, Revkin writes, "agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging."

He also gets a nice quote from Carl Wunsch, a climate and oceans expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Climate change presents a very real risk," says Wunsch. “It seems worth a very large premium to insure ourselves against the most catastrophic scenarios. Denying the risk seems utterly stupid. Claiming we can calculate the probabilities with any degree of skill seems equally stupid.”

Many bloggers are celebrating Revkin's article and, with it, the possibility of a considered, reasoned debate about an issue that tends to inflame passions. (One calls it "An article I've been waiting years to blog.") But others are sticking to their guns. "What bothers me about the whole 'middle way' on this issue is that if the problem is truly reaching crisis proportions, the 'moderates' are mitigating any action that needs be taken NOW!," writes "Rocker." And then there are the cynics – or, perhaps, the realists. R. Pielke Jr. is one of them. "I fully expect that many of the usual suspects on the extremes of the debate (both sides) will respond to this story by saying that they've been in the middle all along," he writes.

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New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin was on "On The Media" this weekend to talk about global warming – and the way the media covers it. The whole thing is worth reading or listening to, but I wanted to highlight a couple of comments. First is this one, in which Revkin talks about the uncertainty in the impact of global warming, at least in the near term:

"When you look ahead at the Arctic later this century, there's not a scientist around studying this stuff who doesn't see the prospect of basically a blue pole at the top of the world for the first time in human history, meaning summertime open water ocean, just like the Atlantic or the Pacific, all the ice gone," says Revkin. "But when you look at the near term, there's been a lot of melting, a lot of strange things going on with the sea ice that they can't ascribe this particular year to our influence on the climate system. They know it's contributing to change but there's enough variability in the Arctic that you can't make a slam dunk case. So that's a nightmare for the media. You know, my editors -- the one thing that makes them glaze over immediately is the word 'incremental.' That's like, at The Times, and I'm sure any other newsroom, that's a death sentence for a story. And global warming is kind of like the Social Security and national debt of the environment. It's there, we all recognize it's some kind of big bad thing, but it's always kind of a 'someday, somewhere story.'"

Revkin argues that journalists should resist the urge to tie climate change stories to natural disasters like hurricanes, since there is legitimate debate by scientists about whether such a connection exists. He says that the real "breaking news" in climate change is that "humans are transforming the way the world works." He continues:

"It's breaking news in terms of the scope of the history of human life on earth, right, which is for most people, a snooze," says Revkin. "I guess it gets down to what is journalism about..."

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Right now, the Environment and Public Works Committee is holding a committee hearing on "Climate Change and the Media." Up for discussion is "how the media has presented scientific evidence regarding predictions of human-caused catastrophic global warming," according to the Washington Times.

The Times got this comment from committee Communications Director Marc Morano: "Senator [James M. Inhofe] believes that poorly conceived policy decisions will result from the media's nonstop hyping of 'extreme scenarios' and dire climate predictions. This hearing will serve to advance the interests of sound science and encourage rational policy decisions."

Inhofe, who chairs the committee, called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" in a July 2003 speech. Chris Mooney has labeled him the "U.S. Senate's leading abuser of science" and argues that Inhofe ”brazenly…ignores what scientists know with confidence about global warming."

I watched the opening of the hearing, which can be viewed online. In his opening statement, Inhofe spoke of the media's "overhyped" and "one sided reporting," specifically pointing to a number of reports, including those by "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley. (We spoke to Pelley about his global reporting reports here and here. Inhofe cited Pelley's comments to us in this Sept. 25 speech.)

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"Tom Brokaw’s lack of objectivity and balance on the issue of global warming appears to have tainted his upcoming Discovery Channel documentary called: 'Global Warming: What You Need To Know' airing on July 16."

So says the GOP majority of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which alleges in a press release that "Brokaw’s partisan past and his reliance on scientists who openly endorsed Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 and who are financially affiliated with left wing environmental groups, has resulted in a documentary that is devoid of balance and objectivity."

The documentary hasn't aired yet; the release relies on a climatologist who saw an advanced copy. As evidence of his lack of objectivity, the release cites Brokaw saying he found Al Gore's global warming film "An Inconvenient Truth" "stylish and compelling.”It is critical of the Brokaw documentary for relying on scientists such as NASA’s James Hansen "without revealing to viewers the extensive political and financial ties that Hansen has to Democratic Party partisans."

The attack on Brokaw's documentary is remarkably similar to criticism of Scott Pelley's global warming pieces on "60 Minutes," criticism we documented here and here. Both Pelley and Brokaw are strong believers that global warming is a serious, and real, phenomenon – Brokaw calls the science "irrefutable," and Pelley says that "the science that has been done in the last three to five years has been conclusive." Pelley also used Hansen, who he calls "the world's leading expert in climate change," in his report.

What's notable here is that the critics are not business interests or scientists but the dominant wing of a government committee. The release suggests that the committee is hostile to the emerging conventional wisdom on global warming, a development Brokaw would certainly find troubling. There may, however, be an upside for him. Says an emailer to TVNewser: "If I were Tom, I'd think this is the best publicity I could possibly get. For the Republicans to attack his documentary before it airs! This will boost its ratings for sure."

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Global warming has been a hot topic (sorry) here at Pubic Eye, and with Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" hitting theatres, it's a good time to reflect on the evolution of press coverage of the issue. For a long time, press accounts focused on whether or not the phenomenon even existed, but lately it's been treated as established fact in the mainstream media, perhaps most notably in Time Magazine and on "60 Minutes." Consider the comments of Scott Pelley, the correspondent on the "60 Minutes" global warming piece, who told me in February that "60 Minutes" didn't air the voices of global warming skeptics in his piece because "[t]here is virtually no disagreement in the scientific community any longer about global warming. The science that has been done in the last three to five years has been conclusive."

Those who feel that global warming is a significant and too-long-ignored issue, such as Gore, are no doubt generally happy with the change in the tenor of the coverage. But appearing on "On The Media" this week, New York Times science writer Andrew Revkin said advocates should consider the potential ramifications of the recent coverage, which, he says, too often plays up the drama while not always nailing down the science:

Many people out there, including many scientists I've talked to, are incredibly frustrated that scientists have not been able to kind of explain this situation in a way that galvanizes a big public response. And so, this is almost a natural reaction, to kind of reach out, to grasp a little farther toward the thing in the here and now world that might make it a media story or might get people's attention. This can backfire. You get into a realm where there's enough debate that opponents of action on global warming can jump right in and say, "You're just fear mongering."

Certainly the "60 Minutes" pieces on the issue and the Time magazine cover, with its tagline "Be worried, be very worried," attracted such charges.

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Global warming has been a hot topic here at Public Eye, thanks to Scott Pelley's two "60 Minutes" reports on the subject. Now Time magazine has weighed in on the topic in a cover story, the thrust of which can be summed up in the tagline that graces the cover: "Be Worried. Be Very Worried."

Pelley, as regular PE readers know, told me "60 Minutes" has not given any time to global warming skeptics in his two stories because "[t]here is virtually no disagreement in the scientific community any longer about global warming." He also said that "It would be difficult to find a scientist worth his salt in this subject who would suggest this wasn't happening. It would probably be someone whose grant has been funded by someone who finds reducing fossil fuel emissions detrimental to their own interests." His comments sparked serious debate in our comments section, with many arguing that Pelley was off base. Wrote "Grypho1":

Can it be fairly deduced that anyone who contradicts what Pelley believes to be 'the prevailing opinion in the scientific community' is, by Pelley's definition, not worthy of respect, scientifically? Is dissent grounds for exclusion by virtue of loss of respect? If so, this intellectually dishonest circular logic assures Pelley and other crusaders of some hollow and meaningless propaganda victories by default.

Now Time's Jeffrey Kluger has taken much the same position as Pelley.

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