Rolling Stone, that doyen of political correctness and bastion of hate for anything that is conservative, published this week its latest attack on the efforts to derail the global warming movement. With an all black cover and absent any other graphics ( the funereal intent not going unobserved), the front cover screams its imprecations (in red) : You Idiots: Meet the Planet’s Worst Enemies. The feature inside, The Climate Killers, proceeds to identify seventeen men whom it alleges are all facilitating the destruction of the planet. They include investor Warren Buffett who, it claims, invests billions in carbon-polluting industries; Rupert Murdoch, whose papers have become the leading source of disinformation about climate change; Fred Singer , author of Nature, Not Human Activity Rules the Climate and 85 -year -old professor emeritus in environmental science at the University of Virginia who is labeled a ” hack scientist”; John McCain, who hasn’t done enough, apparently, to buttress his own beliefs in man-made global warming; Senator James Inhofe, who has led the republican charge in Congress against climate change legislation; George Will, the country’s leading commentator whom it regards as an anti-climate change ideologue masquerading as an intellectual, and several CEOs of leading coal and oil companies.
The article, in brash Rolling Stone style, does not make the case for global warming. It clearly feels that it doesn’t have to. The preceding piece As the World Burns merely rattles off a list of catastrophes that every conscious human must already surely know.
For instance that:
” The Arctic is melting, wildfires are turning into infernos, warm-weather insects are devouring forests, droughts are getting longer and more lethal. And the more we learn about climate change, the more it becomes apparent how enormous the risks are. Just a few years ago, researchers estimated that sea levels would likely rise 17 inches by 2100. Now they believe it could be three feet or more — a cataclysmic shift that would doom many of the world’s cities, including London and New Orleans, and create tens of millions of climate refugees.”
There are no authorities cited for these views; no reference to external data, field research or an offering of independent studies. There is no mention anywhere in the ten pages of the scandal, now famously referred to as Climate Gate – which offers evidence of collusion and conspiracy on the part of leading global warming advocates to defraud the public. Nor is there any attempt to provide a level of balance to the discussion, preferring to launch epithets and bromides against the ‘idiots’ who would deny the veracity of their claims.
In other words, there is no sense in which this piece can be regarded as journalism. It is only an angry screed, unsubstantiated and full of deliberate obfuscations, such as the allegation that every one of the seventeen men on the list can be regarded as a stooge of the fossil fuel industry; that none of them could care less about the future of the planet or about the environment; that greed rules their world view.
Sophomoric, hyperbolic and poorly researched, the feature does little to hoist Rolling Stone much above the noisy yellow journalism of the tabloids. It verifies what I have felt about the magazine for years – that rather than become a leading voice of the intellectual progressive left, as it might wish to characterize itself, it has become an anti-intellectual repository of hate and anger poised against anyone who would challenge its ethos of political, sexual and economic liberation.
What a shame the progressive left allows itself to be under served by such a rank, also ran publication, steeped in oppositional politics yet nihilistically unsure of what it truly values. How sad that any thinking person who reads this awful piece of writing, must come away with the opinion that the crude appellation of ” idiot” has somehow been slapped onto the wrong individuals.
Posted by avidavis 
The Intermediate Zone 