This past weekend, a friend insisted on seeing An Inconvenient Truth. I wanted something less . . . sobering. The movie was more entertaining than I'd anticipated, and I only giggled inappropriately once. I gained greater respect for Al Gore, though I'm glad he's not pursuing a career in voice overs. (Hence the inappropriate giggling.)

Anyway, most of the science in the movie wasn't new to me, in part courtesy of this review article by Bill McKibben. The graphs were pretty, though. The most striking fact to me wasn't one of science, but of reporting. A representative sample of close to 1000 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals found none that questioned the science of global warming or the risk that it poses. A similar sample of articles in the popular press found that 53% (or 56%) -- more than half! -- indicated that there was some controversy surrounding the issue.

That is nontrivial. It does help explain that one Michael Crichton "novel," which had a silly, unresolved plot, in addition to being propaganda with a storyline. But that simple statistic represents -- diagnoses? -- a serious problem with he-said, she-said journalism. It even shows the problem with "balance" as an ideal. (One could even draw analogies to "triangulation" here.)

One of the Cafe denizens has the signature, "You cannot have your own facts." But it looks like the popular press and the scientific press do have their own sets of facts. That is more than a matter of simplification or digestion for mass consumption.

I don't know what should be done, but this is troubling.