DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I was all set to write about a new book on global warming, a topic about which I believe not enough people are frightened. Al Gore wrote a positive review of the book, Ross Gelbspan’s Boiling Point, in the NYTimes today. In one of the most interesting sections, Gore relates the author’s “devastating analysis” of media duplicity in promoting the big-energy company propaganda, in a sort of Foxification of the global warming crisis:

Gelbspan presents a devastating analysis of how the media have been duped and intimidated by an aggressive and persistent campaign organized and financed by coal and oil companies. He recounts, for example, a conversation with a top television network editor who was reluctant to run stories about global warming because a previous story had “triggered a barrage of complaints from the Global Climate Coalition” — a fossil fuel industry lobbying group — “to our top executives at the network.”

He also describes the structural changes in the news media, like increased conglomerate ownership, that have made editors and reporters more vulnerable to this kind of intimidation — and much less aggressive in pursuing inconvenient truths.

But there’s a problem… Gore describes Gelbspan as a “Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the top of his game.” The book jacket states that Gelbspan is the “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.” Yet numerous sources around the web claim that Gelbspan actually never won a Pulitzer.

If we can’t believe a simple factual claim about the author’s credentials, how should we treat the claims inside the book?

I think global warming is a crucial, potentially disastrous issue facing our society, but we need some hard science, not inflated fictions. I hate to judge Boiling Point by its cover, but I’m quite sure Gelbspan’s critics and Big Energy will.