Here’s a classic case of media bias coming through at the most inappropriate of times. You would think that the media could withhold their hatred for a so-called global warming skeptic for a few minutes while publishing a man’s obituary wouldn’t you? Not the New York Times.
In an obituary for Dr. Frederick Seitz, Dennis Hevesi, a Times obit writer, manages to recognize Seitz’s work as noteworthy. Little things like his being “president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1962 to 1969 and president of Rockefeller University … from 1968 to 1978.” Hevesi also recognized that Seitz was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1973 and that he had done pioneering work in condensed-matter physics and solid-state physics as part of his work in ballistics as a member of the National Defense Committee.
There is all of that and much more that marked this man’s life and work. However, rather than dwelling on Seitz’s successes and showing respect for the dead, Hevesi and the New York Times chose to use the bulk of their words to highlight the fact that some people in his field disagreed with Seitz on some matters and that some of his theories were debated by other scientists.
Read it for yourself and question whether you would seriously present this to an editor as a sizable portion of someone’s obituary.
In the 1990s, as consensus about global warming was building, Dr. Seitz’s contrarian views became a spark for debate.
When, in 1998, Dr. Seitz issued a statement and circulated a petition attacking the scientific conclusions underlying international efforts to control emissions of industrial-waste gases, the National Academy of Sciences took the extraordinary step of refuting the position of one its former presidents. The petition called for the United States to reject the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty, negotiated by more than 150 countries, imposing limits on emissions of gases like carbon dioxide.
Dr. Seitz’s petition was accompanied by an article concluding that emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, posed no climatic threat. Instead, the article said, the emissions amounted to “a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution” by stimulating atmospheric carbon dioxide and increasing plant growth.
Dr. Press, who was also President Jimmy Carter’s science adviser, said that while he and Dr. Seitz were good friends, Dr. Seitz “was not a specialist in this field.”
“Most top scientists in the field disagreed with him, I among them,” Dr. Press said. Asked if Dr. Seitz’s beliefs had shifted in recent years, Dr. Press said they had not.
From 1978 to 1988, Dr. Seitz was a member of the medical research committee of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. His work for the company was the subject of a 2006 article in Vanity Fair magazine that criticized what it called an “overlap” between scientists who deny climate change and “tobacco executives who denied the dangers of smoking.”
The article, by Mark Hertsgaard, said that Dr. Seitz had helped R. J. Reynolds “give away $45 million to fund medical research in the 1970s and 1980s,” studies that “avoided the central health issue” of smoking and “served the tobacco industry’s purposes.”
Dr. Seitz called the charges “ridiculous, completely wrong.” In an article for the technology journal TCSDaily, he wrote, “The money was all spent on basic science, medical science,” citing in particular research on mad cow disease and tuberculosis and for the work of the Nobel Prize winner Stanley B. Prusiner, the discoverer of prion, an agent that causes brain and neural infections.
Did everyone catch the sneaky little misrepresentation of CO2 as an “industrial waste gas”? Every time you breathe out, you’re expelling an “industrial waste gas.” What a horrible human being Seitz must have been for trying to suggest that CO2 emissions “industrial waste gases” might not be the end of the world. Did they also notice the dig at Seitz, that he wasn’t a “specialist” in the field of climatology? They’ll all trip over themselves to scribble down every word that drops from the lips of David Suzuki — a fruit fly geneticist — but let a distinguished scientist like Seitz come up with a few thoughts on climate change and they’ll attack him as not knowing what he’s talking about.
It’s really quite amazing that, even when looking back to remember a pioneering scientist immediately after his death, the MSM cannot allow a grudging recognition of his accomplishments without also getting in their political digs. If the man was a climate change denier, they’re going to do whatever they can to string him up, regardless of the circumstances. Their overwhelming bias knows no bounds and pulls NO punches.
Via TimesWatch.org
