Skeptics? What Skeptics?

This article, found in the July/August Columbia Journalistic Review, is damning evidence of a systematic and institutionalized journalisitc suppression of dissent on the topic of anthropogenic global warming.

This article proclaims that it is journalists' duty to be "helpful" in guiding the audience to understand The Truth (caps mine) as represented by today's "scientific consensus". The author rails against the presentation of "debunked theories" and giving airtime to "well-known skeptics". She encourages whenever counter-consensus views are portrayed, that the journalist present AGW rhetoric as the "last word".

Well-meaning or not, this woman and other people like her are ensuring that the public does not get enough information to make a decision on their own (not like many people would take advantage of that intellectual opportunity, of course.) Imagine the difficulty of a teacher trying to provide responsible dissenting views to her students - different from the textbook material, the views of the parents, and the unified voice of the skeptic-free media. As a result, our children are learning a lie.

Both of our presidential political candidates support carbon-cap-and-trade legislation, which has no purpose other than making Al Gore rich. Yet where is the cry against this nonsensical position? Where is the healthy dissent?

The reach of the CJR does not apparently extend to Australia, where we find an article by the environmentalist in charge of monitoring Australia's adherence to the Kyoto Protocol proclaiming the Earth has actually been cooling since 2001. (Sorry bud, but I had the story first.) He goes on to say that a greenhouse effect would create a "hot spot" in the atmosphere 10km above the tropics, and no such hot spot has been found, to the chagrin of AGW alarmists. Their latest spin dances on the line between hilarious and sad:

Recently the alarmists have suggested we ignore the radiosonde thermometers, but instead take the radiosonde wind measurements, apply a theory about wind shear, and run the results through their computers to estimate the temperatures. They then say that the results show that we cannot rule out the presence of a hot spot.

So there you have it - the IPCC conclusion that we are 99% certain to have caused global warming through a greenhouse effect is not based on scientific evidence (ie: actual temperature readings), but instead comes from a computer model based on a theory that "cannot rule out" a hot spot.
The cooling evidence also sounds cut-and-dried, and explains why even now in 2008 the infamous hockey-stick graphs of temperature end at the turn of the century.

The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980)...[removed explanation of urban heat island effect]...NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.

Finally, he sums up the article with this sharp-witted bit of prescience:

When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the [government] is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it.