Answer: The media is a joke.
Question: Why can't the mainstream media use google?

The New York Times posts an op-ed entitled "The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic" by Richard Muller. Muller claims that he was a global warming skeptic until he recently headed a research group at Berkeley, called BEST, showing land temperature has risen. He concludes that global warming is real, significant and entirely human.

Muller's "conversion" is being touted as a klincher on the global warming debate, particularly since the conservative Koch Foundation allegedly funded the study.

The problem is that Muller was never a skeptic, and his study is old news.

The BEST study is old news. I blogged about it last October.

There are problems in the study, which I noted in my October post, and which apparently haven't been answered.

One new problem is that the BEST study is based on land temperature data, which is systematically biased in favor of warming.

In addition, Muller has never been a skeptic. In 2006, he was on record as offering 2 out of 3 odds that human activity was responsible for global warming. Back in 2001, he was touting human pollution as devastating the globe. And here is more evidence that Muller is exaggerating his conversion.

I located that within 10 minutes.

How come that kind of background research is beyond the New York Times?

Another serious question is, doesn't the media realize the game has changed with the internet? Where once we would stop at "Gee, that sounds familiar" or "I thought I read something different" - which was the genesis of this post - people can now locate data from the past and realize that the media is running a shell-game.