Posted on 01/01/2008 5:39:34 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
NY Times: Global Warming Claims Bogus
Tuesday, January 1, 2008 4:38 PM
By: Newsmax Staff
Critics are calling it clear evidence that the climate of opinion on alleged global warming is shifting in favor of skeptics, especially since it comes from the New York Times, until now a fervent acolyte of climate change guru Al Gore and his doctrine of ongoing and disastrous climate change.
In his Times column for the first day of the new year, "In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm," columnist John Tierney took a close look at the global warming debate and found that the climate change scenario being peddled by Mr. Gore and his legion of followers is anything but the settled scientific fact they claim, with the sole doubters being the equivalent of those who believe the earth is flat. Tierney, critics say, has nailed the climate alarmists and exposed their propaganda!
Tierney begins his myth shattering column by telling his readers: "I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction. You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet."
Tierney cautions that he cannot be more specific. "I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather."
Noting that "there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard)."
Those interpreting the weather nowadays, Tierney explains "are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness -- burning fossil fuels."
Tierney recalls that last year British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, however, he writes that "even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, '2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.'
"When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed."
He cites claims by Global warming theory promoters that 2005's Hurricane Katrina was supposed to be "a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers." To the contrary, he recalls "when the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm — by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades — the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all)."
Slow warming, he explains "doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California.
The "availability cascade," Tierney writes, "is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and 'The China Syndrome,' minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy."
Once such a cascade is under way, he adds "it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too."
While Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, he explains, "they’re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents." He cites two studies by NASA and university scientists last year that he reports "concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention — and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs."
Tierney writes that Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, "recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.
"Guess which paper jibed with the theory — and image of Katrina — presented by Al Gore ’s 'Inconvenient Truth'?"
The answer: "the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December — by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.
Tierney recalls that in his speech accepting the Peace Prize, Gore "didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate." Nor, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been in his roundup of the 2007 weather. Instead, Tierney notes, "he alluded somewhat mysteriously to 'stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,' and focused on other kinds of disasters, like 'massive droughts' and 'massive flooding.'
“In the last few months," Mr. Gore said, 'it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.' But he was being too modest," Tierney says, adding, "Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier."
Is this from the OpEd page?
....agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard)
If it gets warmer can we throw Al Gore overboard?
Jonah ping
You have a whaling boat that Al would fit on? Throwing him overboard would make an excellent pay per view show.
Very cute post!
If we throw Al overboard the sea levels will rise all over the world.
Nice work.
Your backyard looks like mine...probably because we’re an FR version of neighbors! ;-)
My husband and kids spent most of the afternoon shoveling the byproducts of global warming hysteria out of the driveway. We got roughly 11.5” of the stuff.
Oh...did you see the weather forecast? 51F on Monday!!!
What is most important in today's media world: opinions or facts?
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potlatch creates all the great animated figures and large animated cartoons -
I just take a few .gifs and backgrounds and scramble them up good and click the “Go” button on my dinky WebTV keyboard and something comes smoking my little black box
Thank you devolve, you put them together uniquely.
In other news, global warming is expected to increase around late June.
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Thanks potlatch -
Wait until they see the graphics you’ll be doing soon!
I really love your post!
Also, I want Freepers to know that 6 months before the first cover Newsweek published on global warming, there was a cover about the threat of nuclear winter. In fact, if this global warming gets bad, we can always use some nuclear winter.
Another liberal loon bits the dust...algore is being made a fool of. HA...and proving both of those awards are nothing more than a huge scam.
booked... for later read
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That is 2 separate animated .gifs
potlatch created the great .gif of Chelsea at left and many others .gifs I use(d) to make the /algore/alglobal.gif omelet
The larger .gif is an evolving (Yikes!) composite of over 18 other animated .gifs
I’ve got several simpler and several other versions of that TIME.gif somewhere here in my laboratory
The libs are a constant and unending source of material
The great thing is everything you can use in parodies or satires is something the libs actually said or did - or were “named after” - like (Sir Edmund) Hillary - who Hillary now claims her mother lied to her about!
Think of that!
The world’s smartest woman still did not know in 1992 (when the Clintoon’s told an Australian audience!) that Edmund Hillary (Hillary was born in 1946) did not climb Mount Everest until May 29th, 1953!
The Time Machine
Hillary invented the Time Machine
And climbed Mount Everest with Huma Norgay!
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