I listened to the award ceremony when they gave him the John Chancellor award last year.

John Chancellor, according to Tom Brokah, who spoke at that ceremony, came from the “lusty school of Chicago journalism”. People from this school took as their obligation: “to print the news and raise hell”.

Later, in ringing tones, Ira Lipman proclaimed: “Through his reporting, John Chancellor dispelled lies and ignorance. For the first time the new age of TV journalism enabled the world to see the ugliness of racial hatred. And the result was a great advance for the cause of civil rights…. And that’s why journalism is so important today. it is our first line of defence against those who would subject the world to lies and ignorance”.

But Andy was catering at that time to those spreading lies and ignorance about the climate issue, daily, on his blog. And now things have gone from bad to worse. I agree with Romm’s judgement: this is the “worst article of his career”. Andy is starting to believe he can write lies.

We’re not at the dawn of the age of television journalism anymore, where it is important for journalists to be the first line of defence against lies and ignorance. We are in the Internet Age. The formal citation honoring Andy with the Chancellor award did not mention dispelling lies and ignorance.

Insteand it said, we ought to recognize and honor Andy because “you respect different sides of this polarizing issue by sticking to the facts”.

But “relatively cool” was a lie when he wrote it, and it remains a lie even though he altered it when he realized it wasn’t flying too well. All that’s left for us to honor is the way Andy can “respect different sides of this polarizing issue”, and it not only isn’t enough, it is the opposite of what civilization, at its best, gives awards for.

Andy said at that award ceremony that there are “deniers” who show up daily on his blog Dot Earth. Imagine John Chancellor running a blog, blithely explaining to an award ceremony there are all these racists advocating that blacks be re-enslaved who show up daily on it, who he shows respect to.

Andy also said there are people on Dot Earth who he calls “catastrophists”. As Andy stated at the ceremony, “somehow”, the “deniers”, the “catastrophists”, and everyone else, “kind of hash it out, and overall, there’s a sense of trajectory, and that leads to a sense of hope.”

This is preposterous. Deniers are spreading what John Chancellor would have called “lies and ignorance”. Deniers are people who would sum up the intense studies of the last thirty years by some of the best and brightest minds civilization has produced as the big problem we face is that Earth is cooling. This is ignorance at best, and lies at worst. Given what is at stake if civilization gets its response wrong, it is looking more and more to be criminal.

The most prominent “catastrophist” in the world, and this was confirmed in the title of the recent New Yorker article about him, is James Hansen. Hansen was there. Hansen stood up at that award ceremony and stated “… I now consider Andy to be the best science writer that I know.”

Hansen had his growing doubts, as he had expressed prior to the ceremony through Romm’s blog saying “Andy, It does seem to me that you now go out of your way to make a “fair and balanced” summary of everything that I write, which is why I hesitate to send you things these days. Sometimes there are actually conclusions worth reporting without denigrating them down to speculations disputed by experts.”

But Hansen was big enough to show up and grant Andy the respect he deserved, at that time, for the sum total of two decades of his life’s work.

What has happened to Andy is a tragedy. He has become an example of what not to do as a reporter.

I like the idea of the tour to educate journalists and ed boards.

When I was a journalist, reps from a tobacco advocacy group and the Canadian medical society toured the country in the early 1990s to talk to the editorial teams at major newspapers. In a nutshell, they wanted to get them on board, and not print any phony science or studies published by smokers’ rights groups. In other words, they were trying to nip the smoking astroturfing push in the bud — and I think it was quite successful.

Time to do it for global warming, too. That anyone is quoting Michaels is absurd. Revkin is a disappointment.