At what point does climate opinion insult climate fact?

Paul Thornton, letters editor at the Los Angeles Times (LAT), recently emphasized a policy on letters about climate science. Though the policy may not be precisely clear—depending on how it’s read—it’s quite clear that something of an international media hubbub has erupted.

The hubbub began when Thornton’s own context-setting editor’s headnote appeared above an article about health care, stating, “letters that have an untrue basis (for example, ones that say there’s no sign humans have caused climate change) do not get printed.” This drew “a harsh reaction from some readers and conservative bloggers,” Thornton reported in a column headlined “On letters from climate-change deniers.” He mentioned a posting at NewsBusters, which says of itself that it seeks to document, expose, and neutralize liberal media bias. That posting began, “It’s one thing for a news outlet to advance the as yet unproven theory of anthropogenic global warming; it’s quite another to admit that you won’t publish views that oppose it.”

But it’s not clear that Thornton banned opposition to any theory of anthropogenic global warming. In his column, he said that “when deciding which letters should run among hundreds on such weighty matters as climate change, [he] must rely on the experts—in other words, those scientists with advanced degrees who undertake tedious research and rigorous peer review.” He continued:

So is Thornton broadly banning all questioning of a scientific consensus that’s based on decades of evidence, or, more narrowly, is he only banning letters asserting, falsely, that the evidence doesn’t even exist? (Or is this either-or framing insufficient?)

Don Irvine at Accuracy in Media sees the broader ban. He wrote , “So much for free speech,” charged that the LAT “won’t publish letters from climate deniers,” and complained that Thornton “conveniently ignores the fact” that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “findings have been disputed by a large number of scientists, and that there is no incontrovertible proof that human-caused climate change exists.”

Others, too, saw something broader than a mere exclusion of the plainly false claim that no evidence even exists for scientists’ consensus:

• * An online commentary at Fox News charged “censorship,” asserting—without denying the mere existence of evidence—that “most people in the U.S. do not believe that there is a global warming problem.”
• * Vincent Carroll, the Denver Post‘s editorial-page editor, asked , "[A]re there really no properly credentialed experts who question whether humans are largely responsible for the warming since the 1970s?”
• * Bruce Chapman, chairman of the board of the Discovery Institute, charged that the LAT exhibited “comic, unwarranted smugness.” He mocked Thornton’s reliance on expert knowledge, then asserted: “Leading critics of the current emphasis on a determinative human role in global warming also have advanced science degrees. But they won’t get letters printed in the LA Times, either.”
• * The Washington Times quoted Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, identifying him as “a leading global-warming skeptic": “Apparently this means [the LAT is] not going to let someone make a political point.”

But commentaries at the Guardian in the UK and at Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald assumed a narrower meaning in Thornton’s policy.

The Guardian piece —while noting wryly that the LAT does, after all, offer a daily horoscope—observed that if you see letters to the editor “as a place where statements of fact need to backed by evidence ... then it’s hard to argue against banning letters claiming there’s no evidence for human caused climate change.”

If indeed Thornton’s policy is to be only narrowly interpreted and enforced, the letters editors at the Sydney paper summed it up :

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.