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This article brings up an issue I often face when looking at articles from sites like this. How do I know the slant of a news site I don't often read? I don't have a problem with a little bias, (in fact, bias is nearly impossible to eliminate imho) but I'd like to know how to approach the article in the first place. It is easier with sites like npr, cnn, foxnews, but it takes a little bit of googling to find out about many others.

How do you guys do it?

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I look at the form of the argument presented. If it employs rhetorical fallacies, or lacks qualifiers to broad statements, or shies away from more than the most cursory contextual explanations, then it's probably bullshit.

Or in programming terms, watch out for undeclared variables, errors in scope, and abuse of the GOTO statement.

+1, awesome analogies.

To me the article displayed a typical revisionism trait: picking one small aspect, proving it wrong and thereby claiming to disprove the whole theory. It is like the creationists who think finding some obscure bone somewhere that falls outside of the predictions of some obscure application of evolution theory somehow disproves evolution theory.

While I can imagine a lot of things, I very much doubt that the whole climate debate rests on one unobtainable data set.

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