It seems almost too easy to criticize the Albuquerque Journal for running yet another Marita K. Noon column, because we’ve pointed out her errors,  simplistic assertions and lack of expert credentials in the past.

But the Journal’s Op-Ed (opposite editorial) page carries her again today, this time with a convoluted essay headlined “Carbon Tax Honest; Cap and Trade Isn’t” (subscription required), which leads with an unsubstantiated anecdote about health care.

I won’t even attempt to sort out her stream of attempted logic, other than to point out some of the column’s myriad unsubstantiated claims. It’s another example of a column thrown at the public without any kind of vetting, fact-checking or even editing.

Some of the assertions from her column:

Those responsible for getting the hospitals paid for the services acknowledge that getting money from the private insurance companies is much easier than from the companies getting funded through government.

Never mind the mangled English, who is saying this? Noon doesn’t say.

How does this connect to cap and trade?

She answers with:

First, understand that cap and trade is a government plan to deal with so-called man-made global warming.

Love that use of “so-called,” and then she asserts:

While the entire climate change issue is challenged due to the acknowledged data forgeries and plummeting public concern over climate, governments are still moving forward with cap and trade plans.

With this sentence, she asserts that the entire issue is challenged, and offers as evidence unsubstantiated “acknowledged” information, this time in the form of “data forgeries”. And then she declares public concern over climate is “plummeting.” If that’s true, why do climate stories run on the news and Op Ed pages nearly every day?

In fact, just the day before, The Sunday Journal ran a column by a Santa Fe writer whose credentials include a post-graduate degree in climate change and carbon management. In it, Mark Giorgetti asserts that a disinformation campaign is being put out by “promoters of the fossil fuel industries and unregulated corporate expansion.” He doesn’t name them, but this is an apt description of CARE, the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy of which Noon is executive director, which claims to support citizens’ rights but is an unabashed supporter of extractive industries like oil and gas.

Unfortunately, the way the Journal packaged Giorgetti’s column can leave the erroneous impression its content comes from yet another climate change naysayer.

The headline, “Climate Controversy a Hoax,” technically is an accurate reflection of Giorgetti’s position (it’s the controversy that’s a hoax, not the science). But those who scan headlines could interpret it to mean climate change is a hoax. And to further cement that impression, the column ran with a cartoon showing a dinosaur holding up a sign that says “Climate Change is a Hoax.” Again, the cartoon actually supports what the column says – the dinosaur who holds up the “hoax” sign is calmly standing while his frightened fellow dinosaurs run to escape the obvious change in their midst: an erupting volcano.

Considering Girogetti’s credentials, his take on global warming deserves to be read, but likely will be dismissed as yet another of the unsubstantiated, agenda-driven opinions the Journal runs with annoying frequency, such as those written by Noon.

Giorgetti makes the case that yes, it does snow even in times of global warming, and says those denying climate change have an agenda – to block movement toward a clean energy economy in order to preserve that of fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, Noon, a so-called expert on climate change, helpfully offers that if there is climate change, “there is nothing humans can do to change what has been going on for millions of years,” so why inconvenience the oil and gas industry with cap and trade and other regulations?

In conclusion, she says cap and trade is nothing more than a tax, so:

. . . support the idea of a carbon tax. It is more honest. And no one wants more taxes.

Simplistic? Yes.

Honest? Not even the Journal seems to know what that means anymore.

Before we take a two-week hiatus for the holidays, I’d like to commend the Albuquerque Journal for recently publishing articles that atone somewhat for its running – just before the Copenhagen summit – the alleged climate change exposé now known as “Climate-Gate”.

Last month, the Journal was among more than 325 American newspapers that ran (in the Journal’s case, in the “A” section) a wire story about hacked emails, which cast climate scientists in a political light and gave credence to those who say global warming is a “fiction.”

Considering its scope and resources, the Journal couldn’t be expected to independently assess and counter reports about the information allegedly found in thousands of emails hacked from a top climate research center in the United Kingdom and dumped on a Russian Web server.

But to its credit, it did run this month a body of reportage casting doubt on the impression left by the original story it had carried, variations of which ran worldwide. (Sorry, no link seems to be available of what the Journal ran last month.)

The progressive group Think Progress says conservatives hijacked the climate change issue with that story, and it posts a detailed account of the hacking saga in an article called “A Case of Classic SwiftBoating: How the Right-Wing Noise Machine Manufactured ‘Climategate’.” That article contends that:

Polluter-funded climate skeptics, along with their allies in conservative media and the Republican Party, sifted through the e-mails, and quickly cherry picked quotes to falsely accuse climate scientists of concocting climate change science out of whole cloth.

The site adds that the coverage given the contrived email story reveals a troubling and “increasing willingness for traditional media outlets, from the Evening News to the Washington Post, to largely reprint unfounded right-wing smears without context or critical reporting.” (Links are theirs.)

The Journal, however, after printing the original report has since provided some critical reporting and/or context (along with columns, both local and national, and letters to the editor championing both “sides”). Among the articles of substance: a Washington Post analysis that ran Dec. 8, a McClatchy Newspapers Q&A report the Journal ran on its Sunday Dimension cover Dec. 13, an Associated Press self-described “exhaustive review” of the emails that ran on A-11 that same Sunday and, most importantly, the UpFront column by John Fleck Dec. 15.

The Post analysis that ran on Page One Dec. 8 (one criticism: it was not labeled as analysis), summarized the email controversy by saying the original stories cast climate scientists in a political light and gave ammunition to those who think climate change is overblown. But it stated that the emails “don’t provide proof that human-caused climate change is a lie or a swindle.”

The informative McClatchy report that ran Dec. 13 included, among other things, an explanation of scientists’ use of the word “trick” in talking about research data, which the early reports had used pejoratively as evidence scientists were trying to manipulate data. The McClatchy summary says the “trick” alluded to in the email “meant using two sets of data together to show temperature trends,” which was publicly discussed in an article in Nature and not nefarious, as the original story had implied.

The AP account in the Journal was headlined “Climate Scientists Expressed Doubts, But E-mails Show No Signs Data Was Fudged,” the content of which can be read here.

Fleck expands on the email conversations in his column, noting that more than a thousand scientific emails are “now available for all to read on the Internet.”  He adds:

In a world where we must depend on the integrity of scientists to help guide societal decisions, some of the e-mails are troubling, showing some researchers trying to spin the data to win arguments with their political opponents. . . .

But he directs the conversation back to local data:

Here in the Southwest, the question of whether we can trust climate science – not the few scientists involved in the e-mails but the enterprise as a whole – matters a great deal because of what the science’s leading practitioners have been telling us in recent years.

Among those practitioners are authors of a Bureau of Reclamation report, released last month, which Fleck says shows the ‘00s to be the driest 10-year stretch in the Colorado River Basin since record-keeping began more than 100 years ago.

He also talks with University of New Mexico professor Dave Gutzler, whom he describes as “annoyingly cautious” when it comes to research on southwestern climate, which, as Fleck says, is “what you want in a scientist.”

Gutzler (whom Fleck says was not among the hacked e-mail correspondents) would tell you that the dwindling Colorado and melting arctic ice are not proof of climate change, Fleck says, adding:

The natural ups and downs of climate from year to year and decade to decade make it genuinely difficult to tease out long-term trends and determine their cause, (Gutzler) said in an interview.

But taken together, he says rising CO2 from the coal, oil and gasoline we burn to fuel our lives is the most likely explanation for the all those changes in climate we are now seeing, from the shrinking arctic sea ice to the drying Colorado.

“Observations of CO2 concentrations, solar variability, laboratory measurements of the greenhouse effect, measurements of heat storage in the oceans, observations of glacier retreat and polar icecaps, modeling studies of paleoclimate and the 20th century, etc. etc., all taken together, support the general consensus that climate is warming, and will continue to get warmer, as greenhouse gas concentrations increase,” Gutzler wrote.

“Nothing in the hacked e-mails, Gutzler said, has changed any of that,” Fleck wrote.

We can only hope these follow-ups helped change any public misconceptions created by the first stories to emerge from those hacked e-mail accounts.

It’s a little early for Valentine’s Day – and I’m a little late with this post – but I wanted to call attention to the consistently good writing done by Albuquerque Journal science reporter John Fleck.

Fleck, who covers science, climate change and water issues and blogs here for the paper (subscription required) is a veteran science journalist and admitted weather geek. He also writes a personal blog, and he just published a book on climate change for middle-schoolers called “Tree Rings’ Tale.”

He’s a great writer with a devoted following. Here’s part of what I think makes my former colleague so distinctive among his peers.

Newspaper reporters know that scientists of any kind are a tough crowd to cover, mostly because they’ve spent years earning advanced degrees and mastering their subjects and don’t look kindly upon writers who’s job it is to boil it all down for the masses.

But Fleck, who has been writing for the Journal for nearly 20 years,  has earned the respect of the people and institutions he covers by making science news readable and enjoyable without dumbing it down or getting it wrong.

Late last month, the Yale Climate Media Forum included Fleck in a pretty heady crowd of journalists it singled out for being the best in the nation at covering climate change for a broad print audience.

A story on the site reviewing Associated Press science reporter Seth Borenstein’s efficient smackdown of global warming deniers included this (emphasis mine):

Along with The New York Times‘ Andrew C. Revkin, Science magazine’s Richard Kerr, the Christian Science Monitor’s Peter Spotts, the Albuquerque Journal’s John Fleck, and the Houston Chronicle’s Eric Berger, and a small sampling of additional journalists, Borenstein is considered by most of his professional colleagues to be among the best reporters covering climate change science for a broad print audience.

Praise like this couldn’t happen to a nicer or more talented guy. Good job, John!