So, is it now liberals who talk about stoning abortion providers and the women who seek them out?

Can I throw the BS flag?

Now, for those who don’t hang around academics all day, I want to explain what Gore means by “peer-reviewed,” because it’s important. A peer-reviewed scientific journal is one where the editors and readers who make decisions about what to publish are themselves credentialed scientists. Peer-reviewed journals put submissions through a screening process whereby they are evaluated by qualified professionals in the field, who recommend for or against publication on the basis of whether the science is sound and whether the conclusions are important. Naturally scientific journals want to publish studies that generate a lot of interest; but they are trying to generate that interest in the scientific community, and in order for scientists to get excited about a conclusion they have to be persuaded by the research behind it.

Peer-reviewed articles are thus held to a different and much more rigorous standard of proof than scientific articles that come out in mainstream media sources, where the only way most editors have of testing the validity of one expert’s research is to talk to another expert. The imperative to be “objective,” or more accurately to present the appearance of being politically neutral, encourages editors and producers to keep calling up ‘experts’ until they can find someone willing to argue ‘the other side.’ But–and this is the point of this part of Gore’s presentation–on global warming, within the community of scientific professionals who are competent to evaluate the evidence, there is no other side. The only ‘experts’ on the ‘other side’ are the mouthpieces who are paid to be there, either by the Bush administration or by the petroleum and automotive industries. So these media articles that purport to show you “both sides” of the global warming debate are not so much showing you the other side of the issue as generating it. ”

And guess which side speaks louder.

The government doesn’t have a role in censoring which scientific reports get portrayed in the public eye. Every scientific report gets published in a scientific journal, and it’s up to the news companies to decide if a journal article is worth reporting on, if they even know about it.

Side note: froofrou rocks. That is all.