Health skeptic dismayed by climate skeptics (again)

At the moment I should be studying for exams, and yet I feel this compulsion to keep posting for my readers (who now number in the ones, and thats counting those who got here accidentally by googling "strippers" and "bend over". Suckers.)

The internal dialoguing between me and the medical part of my brain (which has taken to speaking in the voice of Keanu Reaves circa Bill and Ted) has been going something like this:

Me: Yo! Cardiovascular risk factors and the pathophysiology of proximal muscle myopathies. Get on it! An whats mianserin?

Brain: Dude. I don't know. I wanna drink beer and fantasize about that pathologist you think has been checking you out. He's, like, a total NILF.

(FYI: For those of you familiar with the concept of MILF, a NILF is a Nerd I'd Like to....oh, you get the picture.)

Not that my standards are that high or anything, when normal females were extolling the virtues of, say, Johnny Depp, I was mentally drafting a mash note to the actor David Thewlis. And Mr. Paua has been such a bunghole for the past year that at the moment I would probably go home with a Young Liberal if they said I had nice hair.

David Thewlis: Phwoar...

Regardless of my personal desire to go rock in a corner until the exams go away, I must press on with the quasi medical themed posts. So here we are, for the readers!

Riffing on the topic of born-again medical skeptics who think that AGW skeptics are giving them a bad name, I discovered this opinion piece from the desk of the Melbourne Age health editor.

While on the one hand he was examining (at great length) his own biases and arrogance he had uncovered during an email exchange with a mother scared of the swine flu vax, he also mentions he has been pondering this:

About climate change, and the (to me) bewildering refusal of the sceptics to accept that there is a scientific consensus, and that dissent in and of itself does not make a genuine debate.

Cheers, mate. You call yourself a science or health journalist and yet don’t seem to recognise the essential oxymoron that is the term “scientific consensus”. You spend half the article pulling your own man bits over how:

It is up to me to decide who is a crank — otherwise I would be wasting my readers' time. My job as a journalist is not to deluge readers with unverified information. It is to report verifiable facts, and filter out the rest — this is the standard that our profession is held to, and I take it seriously.

If that’s the case, how on earth have you missed the many, many verifiable facts out there in regards to the skeptical view of Anthropogenic Global Warming?
Maybe it’s because:

I'm a reporter, my training replies. That's what I do. Work out what I think the truth is, and tell people.

Ohhh. I getcha. You’re just working with your beliefs, not a scientific methodology, and that’s what the other journos are doing, and so you live in this happy world where you don’t have to allow yourself to be exposed to another, challenging viewpoint. That’s not science, and it’s not balanced journalism either.

Brain: Journo, dude. You, like, suck.