Hmmm - I arrived home after a hard week of BIOL 2010 (PLANTS) lectures and more missed deadlines, to pick up the Globe and Mail Friday edition for a nice, relaxing read, when I suddenly sat up straight at Neil Reynolds' Business section column - The mythical assertion of fossil fuel scarcity. It's all about a recent article by Professor Emeritus Peter Odell, in the European Energy Review (I haven't downloaded and read it yet, but I will).
"Wow!" I thought, "it kind of goes against everything that I have been reading about Peak Oil, for much of the last decade", so it must be important. And then, I ask myself, who is this Odell? Quickly checking him on Google Scholar, I found that my academic work is cited more than his, and he's 30 years older than I am. Then, I check him out further, and find some interesting comments in response to an article, in the same vein, that he wrote in The Guardian in 2008. Some of the quite long, coherent, as opposed to the short, incoherent, responses say things like "Mr. Odell, I request that you get up to speed on what's happening with the world oil situation. Your misinformation is doing everyone a great disservice" and "Unfortunately, Mr. Odell is woefully unaware of the current oil situation" and "Anybody who knows anything about oil is aware that the R/P ratio is a pointless statistic. If Peter Odell is using it, he either ignorant or disingenuous" and, my favourite, "I seriously don't see how you could be a professor emeritus of international energy studies and believe the stuff you have written".
But, it gets better - Prof. Emeritus Odell is on Republican Senator J. Inhofe's notorious and hilariously debunked list of supposed expert climate change skeptics. For the debunking by Prof. A. Dessler, just go to: http://www.grist.org/article/the-inhofe-400-skeptic-of-the-day1/ and keep changing the number at the end of the url to 3. And, while you're at it, check out the very detailed debunking of Dr. Seitz as a climate denier, which is one of Peter Sinclair's "crock of the week" videos.
A few blogs ago, I outlined what I perceived to be a failure of the Canadian media to carry out proper investigative reporting vis-a-vis Bjorn Lomborg, and, well, it just carries on, unfortunately with a columnist in my favourite Canadian newspaper. This is not the first time that Neil Reynolds has published anti-climate change columns that sort of have an an aura of balanced reporting. In the same way that academics carrying out medical research must reveal all of their sources of research funding when publishing articles, it would be helpful for members of the Canadian Press to reveal their political affiliations. Then it'd be obvious to those readers who are not prepared to dig a little deeper as to exactly where they are coming from.
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Michael Enright give an after-dinner speech, and was surprised to hear him decry the appalling state of investigative journalism in Canada. (He named the New York Times as the best newspaper in the world. I started paying a lot more attention to it, and have been forced to come to the conclusion that he probably was right. For TV journalism, I would have to say, that Al-Jazeera English, is also right up there in terms of quality of in-depth reporting, with respect to covering generally ignored issues). I have now come to the sad conclusion that his assessment of the general state of Canadian journalism was also pretty much bang on.
Dawn R. Bazely
