Scoop Romm

Our fearless climate hero is doing double duty as a reporter now. Determined to ice discussion of possible short-term temperature stabilization trends, Scoop Romm touts an “exclusive interview” he scored with Mojib Latif, a Germany-based climate scientist whose work and quotes have become blogosphere fodder for the contrarian crowd, in part because of these two passages in a recent Andy Revkin story:

Mojib Latif, a prize-winning climate and ocean scientist from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel, in Germany, wrote a paper last year positing that cyclical shifts in the oceans were aligning in a way that could keep temperatures over the next decade or so relatively stable, even as the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming continued to increase.

But Dr. Latif, who gives about 200 talks to the public, business leaders and officials each year, said he had been met with confusion and even anger when he tried to describe this normal variation in climate while at the same time conveying the long-term threat of global warming.

That story prompted this apoplectic reaction from Romm and now has prompted our “indispensable” climate hero to ring up Dr. Latif himself, presumably to set the record straight. There’s just one, teeny problem with Romm’s “exclusive interview”: you can’t read it, because Romm hasn’t posted it. All you get are small fragments of quotes interspersed throughout Romm’s bloated 2,500 post. (So much for those shorter posts you promised us, Joe.)

Now I’m pretty sure we can assume that Romm at some point in his interview asked Dr. Latif straight out: Did Andy Revkin misquote you or misintrepet your work? I mean, that’s what Romm and other climate advocats contend, so why wouldn’t he ask Latif that? Well, if Romm posed the question, we don’t know the answer, because it’s not mentioned as part of his “extended” interview with Latif.

So can anyone tell me what is so “exclusive” about Romm’s interview with Latif? Any major clarifications or breaking news? We know Romm is skilled at breathlessly hyping weather disasters, so I guess it shouldn’t surprise us that he can hype his own journalistic contributions as well.