If the media can draw false equivalences between “skeptics” and “believers” in the climate science debate, it can also sometimes cherry-pick the most outlandish climate change claims even when they have been repudiated by the bulk of a scientist’s peers. “The thing is, many people are going around talking as if they looked at the data. I guarantee that nobody ever has,” Schmidt told me after New York’s October 2011 snowstorm, which various media outlets portrayed as evidence either for or against global warming.
