[Earlier this month I posted the comment below at gawker.com, in response to someone who was essentially arguing that the New York Times is a good newspaper. The Politico survey was brought to my attention by Climate Progress, here]
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There's nothing "perceived" about how dumb and inadequate the NY Times is, except in the sense that that perception is completely vindicated by reality.
[www.politico.com]
Take a look at this Politico survey of the Top 80 headlines of stories on the front page of the NY Times in 2010 (measured by the column-width size of the headlines). Of those top 80 headlines, ZERO had anything to do with climate change.
I'm not a scientist, but I do know a good deal about the science of climate change, partly by way of a 45-page article I researched and published on the topic. I can tell you that for all of the devastating weather events around the world that took place in the past year - some of which (Russian wildfires and peat bog fires, Australia floods) are already driving up world food prices - in five or ten years, we'll be looking back on a year like this as "the good old days." It is GUARANTEED to get that much worse.
Climate change is the most profound thing that has ever happened to human civilization, and its ramifications are extremely serious. These include, among many others, a dramatic increase in food and water shortages in a world with ever-more people, and storms worse than anything we've seen yet destroying cities and leading to refugee-related conflicts between nations. Unfortunately, I think it's unlikely that the US will remain protected from the worst of these effects for very much longer.
Climate change is actually the biggest story of all time, and in 2010 the NY Times mentioned it in ZERO of their top 80 headlines. Therefore, I'm on very solid ground when I say that the NY Times is dumb and inadequate.
