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."
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Yeah, me too. January comes, and with it the winter snows. Right on schedule.
When / if a link or archive of the actual NYT article gets posted, I would really appreciate a ping.
That gif just keeps getting more crowded.
This capitulation by the Times is another nail in the coffin of the old media. The internet is too powerful to manipulate (unless of course you are google)
Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize .... the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE!
What is wrong with you people?
What's not to trust?
How true, even LOOTER GUY knows it, lol.
Zing!
Even the NT Times is repudiating Al Gore and his phony global warming scam. I hope global warming is sufficiently discredited before Congress adopts some global warming legislation.
2007 marked the beginning of the end of the Great Global Warming Hoax. Let’s make 2008 the year that this concept hits the dust bin of history - along with Algore, Hillary, and statins!
Maybe recent polling is showing that GW is becoming too associated with kooks and Hillary wants to project a more moderate image of the DNC.
It’s been a pretty poor year to be a Democrat. Surge is working, Climate Change keeps getting shot full of holes, the do nothing Pelosi & Reid congress getting stymied at every turn. Dennis Kucinich is one of your presidential candidates.
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