That Wacky, Wacky Wall St. Journal

The Wall Street Journal is known for its tight focus on the issues of interest to American businessmen, and for the seriousness of its reporting, which doesn’t even allow for photographs on the front page.

But when it comes to climate change, the editorial side of the paper seems to go a little crazy. In an editorial last year, for example, the paper claimed that global warming, if an issue at all, was "a problem that’s a few centuries off."

They take the head-in-the-sand position despite the example of countless American and foreign corporations who are not just convinced of the reality of global warming, but see it as a rich new field for innovation and profit, including heavyweights such as Duke Energy, GE, and British Petroleum.

Not to mention Fortune magazine, the first publication in this country to review Time reporter Eugene Linden’s new book on global warming, "The Winds of Change," which sharply warns of the risks of WSJ-style inaction, to businesses and citizens alike.

This year the WSJ published, an editorial that dismisses the threat of global warming in language so arch that you can practically hear the creaking of the old leather club chairs and get a whiff of cigar smoke just from reading it. It’s behind a subscriber firewall, conveniently for the paper, but was reproduced in an entry in the comments below this Real Climate post on the subject, which is very funny, and posted in its entirety below:

The Wall Street Journal has published another fair and balanced critique of climate change science and negotiations, in a Business World commentary by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr, here. A summary of the arguments is as follows:

1. It will never be possible to prove that global warming is real. In the same way, we point out, it will never be possible to prove that anybody died from lung cancer because of smoking. Did you actually witness that first DNA mutation?

2. The reasonable lay person cannot be expected to read a scientific paper, so the rational response is to ignore the issue.

3. A paper about frogs did not argue convincingly that people cause global warming.

4. People sometimes distort the truth (truly a shocking charge coming from the WSJ).

5. Global change negotiations are stalled in politics, so the science must be wrong.

Final thought: When climate does change, we’ll be able to fix it anyway.