In reality, there are reasonable explanations out there for the "unexpected" but they ignore them b/c it does not fit the narrative of CAGW. And heaven forbid they mention anything that deflates CAGW. Often, the MSM and unfortunately some scientists are selective and cherry-pick things to support a narrative.
Good post, Boris. I somewhat disagree with your statement, however. I'm assuming that "CAGW" means "Climatic Anthropogenic Global Warming" or something close to to that (i.e. human-aided global warming). Whether or not an organized conspiracy or intentional agenda exists across all MSM (which I'm not so sure is true in
all cases), periodicals such as
Popular Mechanics actually do a public service by bringing the often-controversial topic of climate change to the attention of the interested
non-scientific reader, who might otherwise make no effort to educate himself or herself. Factual information or education should never be controversial, but rather the antidote to conspiracy theory and the spread of untruthful misinformation. Discussion of accurate scientific details such as you bring up above would, of course, help immensely to "drive home" the points that many of these articles and MSM stories do attempt to make, but the reality is that many publishers of these pieces have neither the inclination (or interest) to delve deeper (as you have done) nor the time (due to time slots, publication deadlines, etc.) to do so. Thus, the message may appear to come across to the reader as being biased, cherry-picked, or slanted in one way or another; but this may not necessarily be the
preconceived intent of the publisher. They "scratch the surface" with their content and think that's good enough for general public consumption (remember, this is
not the content of vetted, professional journals). The key is for the intelligent, interested reader to read and study
many different viewpoints to form a basis for making up one's own mind, rather than allowing oneself to be "steered" or swayed by any particular source of information, especially MSM information.
With regard to the ending sentence of the statement above, early-on in my consulting career, an elderly colleague once said to me: "You must walk around
all sides of a problem before you draw any conclusions!" I have never forgotten that advice, and it has served me well throughout my career. I bring this up because that statement embodies what
good, factual science is really all about. Any "scientist" who does not practice that principle is really not a scientist at all, because his/her findings can never be totally objective. Scientific objectivity requires a bit more effort, total honesty, and an open mind from start-to-completion of the research study. A bona fide scientist would never get away with concocting some argument that fits a preconceived result because his/her work would first be refereed by a jury of professional peers, who would see to it that the "findings" never get into the public domain in the first place. Unfortunately, as you pointed out, the MSM have no such standards of acceptable practice because their primary objective is to appease their paying advertisers by counting the number of eyeballs watching. It's more often about meeting or exceeding rating quotas and profit benchmarks than doing good-old fact-checking, the end result being that the truth from such sources often "never sees the light of day"...
