Not many diplomats shared Czech President Vaclav Klaus’s opinion about global warming at a special meeting of the United Nations two weeks ago:

Contrary to many self-assured and self-serving proclamations, there is no scientific consensus about the causes of recent climate changes.

Not even George W. Bush or Condoleeza Rice, who represented Bush at the U.N. meeting, would be caught uttering such an extreme statement these days, and they are not alone. The prime ministers of Canada and Australia, Steven Harper and John Howard, have also softened their once-ardent doubt that man-made greenhouse gases are the biggest culprits in global warming.

The press, too, has cut a lot of the skeptical points of view that it once used to “balance” climate articles. Journalists are now more confident about sticking to quotes from mainstream scientists who support the central conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): that human beings are the primary force behind global warming. Taking it a step farther, Newsweek and Rolling Stone have even run long features chronicling the manipulations of what the former labeled “the denial machine.”

This trend notwithstanding, the press still makes occasional room for doubt. In particular, a recent series from The Christian Science Monitor stands out for its conspicuous overture to skeptics. Articles in the ongoing series, which began September 20, explore arguments that global warming is part of natural climate cycles, and whether such dissenting opinions are suppressed at the IPCC.

“This series really came about because we got a lot of letters from readers asking about sunspots as the cause of global warming, or this, or that, or the other,” said Greg Lamb, a science and technology writer for the Monitor who has coordinated the paper’s coverage of climate change. “And we’d also been getting criticism because our articles tended to support the idea that humans are behind global warming.”

In response, Lamb and the paper’s editor, Richard Bergenheim, decided to extend an olive branch, so to speak, to skeptics. “We decided on a series that would look at alternative theories and give them fair hearing,” Lamb said, “while at the same time pointing out that they’re not the majority views in the scientific community.”

Indeed, the Monitor clearly believes that man-made climate change is a problem that should be confronted quickly and directly. Last spring, Lamb helped create article headlined, “Might warming be normal?” The piece, by staff writer Brad Knickerbocker, is reminiscent of the climate stories written last year, before the IPCC’s influential fourth assessment report was released in February. The first half of the article quotes two skeptics (one a scientist, one not) and the second quotes two believers (again, one a scientist, one not). They each comment on the viability of alternate warming theories, such as changing solar and ocean cycles, but the reader is unsure what to make of it all.

Many climate journalists have come to accept that, given the scientific debate about climate, mere transmission of information is of little value without an accompanying interpretation. It is the lack of this analysis that makes Knickerbocker’s article deficient. While it is completely valid to explore dissenting opinions, journalists must do more than stand competing quotes next to one another; they must explain which one holds more currency and why. The second and third articles in the Monitor’s skeptics series do a better job of this.

The second article, which ran a week later under the headline, “Are sunspots prime suspects in global warming?” examines one alternative hypothesis in detail. The sun’s natural cycles, including its spots, which are associated with greater radiation and thus warming, are a cause célèbre among skeptics. While this is a theory that most scientists reject, in the Monitor article, reporter Peter N. Spotts (yes, that’s right) points out that, “some pesky correlations - such as the one between sunspot cycles and cloud cover - linger.” Spotts, who has written about skeptics before, is careful with the science, however, and delivers the interpretation that was missing in the series’ first installment: “No one doubts that the sun drives the Earth’s climate,” he writes up high in the piece. “The vast bulk of research, however, points to greenhouse gases.”

The third and most recent entry, published last Thursday under the headline, “Is the research too political?” explores the most pertinent question of the series thus far: in drafting its reports, does the IPCC suppress dissent? Few people, journalists included, understand even the basic structure of the IPCC, leading to confusion about whether it is a scientific or political organization, let alone finer mechanical points about how it reconciles rival opinions. In the Monitor, reporter Moises Velasquez-Manoff, chooses good sources - John Christy and S. Fred Singer on the skeptics’ side, and Gavin Schmidt and Kevin Trenberth on the believers’ side - to flesh out possible bias at the IPCC. Their comments are insightful and well-balanced, even if the article is not entirely conclusive about the degree to which politically-driven muffling in a problem. At the very least, the Monitor deserves credit for broaching this subject: the internal mechanics of the IPCC are woefully under-reported by the press.

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