Posted on 08/12/2007 9:58:04 PM PDT by CedarDave
It appears hell hath frozen over, for a Newsweek contributing editor published an article Saturday extraordinarily critical of his magazine's cover story last week about "global-warming deniers" being funded by oil companies in an organized scam to thwart science.
In fact, Robert J. Samuelson accurately noted how "self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism," and that this disgraceful article was "an object lesson of how viewing the world as ‘good guys vs. bad guys' can lead to a vast oversimplification of a messy story."
Fortunately, Samuelson was just getting warmed up:
The story was a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading.
NEWSWEEK's "denial machine" is a peripheral and highly contrived story. NEWSWEEK implied, for example, that ExxonMobil used a think tank to pay academics to criticize global-warming science. Actually, this accusation was long ago discredited, and NEWSWEEK shouldn't have lent it respectability. ...
The alleged cabal's influence does not seem impressive. The mainstream media have generally been unsympathetic; they've treated global warming ominously. The first NEWSWEEK cover story in 1988 warned the greenhouse effect. danger: more hot summers ahead. A Time cover in 2006 was more alarmist: be worried, be very worried. Nor does public opinion seem much swayed. Although polls can be found to illustrate almost anything, the longest-running survey questions show a remarkable consistency....
Shocking. But, Samuelson wasn't finished:
But the overriding reality seems almost un-American: we simply don't have a solution for this problem. As we debate it, journalists should resist the temptation to portray global warming as a morality tale-as NEWSWEEK did-in which anyone who questions its gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed as a fool, a crank or an industry stooge. Dissent is, or should be, the lifeblood of a free society.
Bravo, Robert! Bravo!
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbusters.org ...
When it does collapse, as you say, the machine is already warming up for the next global crisis of Nitrogen Overload; the scientists will simply shift seats and the journalists will grab a clean sheet and away we go.
The fact that 1998 was the canary in the mine for the big push for action and we now know that the canary was really a dead duck from 1934 come back to haunt us is totally antithetical to the current argument and conclusion that the danger is imminent.
It should be obvious that human influence is now at least three times greater than then while industrial sources are orders of magnitude more prevalent around the globe.
Most of the reliable data is from the northern hemisphere and the majority of that is the westernmost portion because of the network of reporting stations.
Meanwhile, they have been busy adjusting and correcting air-soundings and satellite measurements in a mad rush to make them fit the surface record and now we discover that the surface record is far less reliable than we previously had determined.
This is a major problem for the doomsayers and they know it.
I don't think Robert Samuelson "suddenly" found integrity. He's never lost it. I don't always agree with him, but he's far more intelligent and infinitely more intellectually honest than, say, Eleanor Clift.
The solution is what we should really be debating, since reasonable and effective solutions don’t depend on identifying what portion of the warming trend (if any) is attributable to human activity.
The best proposal I’ve heard yet it to put strategically placed reflectors in orbit to deflect some of the sun’s rays. The beauty of this is that it can be undone easily if unwanted side effects occur, or if other events (think major volcanic activity setting off a major cooling trend) require a change in strategy. This is in stark contrast to proposals which basically involve putting massive brakes on economic activity. If all the resources being poured into this debate about cause were diverted towards developing technology that would enable us to control climate, we’d all be a lot better off, both now and in the long run.
I'd like to document the Santa Barbara station for http://www.surfacestations.org/. Yesterday, I went down to where it resides according to Google, and sure enough, there it was; literally feet from a massive water treatment silo, in the middle of a parking lot.
It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?
You say there is no doubt the world is heating up significantly. Excuse me, what do you know that credible scientists don’t know? You fling this glittering generality out there with absolutely no proof that the 1/4 degree or less of warming measured over the past 30 years or so (remember, in the ‘70s these same pseudo scientists were telling us we were headed for an ice age) has any significance whatsoever. Credible scientists know exactly why the earth has warmed a bit—it’s the sun. And you don’t have to be a scientist to know the earth has gone through numerous warming/cooling periods over the millenia. There is absolutely no reason to believe this won’t happen again. Finally, I don’t understand why you evidently believe that today’s temperature is the optimum temperature. I have no objection, in principle, to reducing man-made emissions of any kind so long as common sense and cost guide these efforts. I’m sick and tired of the zealots who are convinced only they have the answer to saving the world.
You are deluded, sir, if you think mere man will ever be able to contol climate and weather to any significant degree. Certainly we can try to predict storms better, but the main defense will always be preparedness. Man’s best course of action is to accomodate Mother Nature—not the other way around.
That the climate cools and warms over the centuries and millenia is not a hoax. It is a well established phenomoneon.
For me, the single most impugnable ASSUMPTION of the current warming scare is that there is an optimal global climate and we know what that is.
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time, since my graduate school days in the mid-90’s, following this stuff, and I was blown away that the IPCC doesn’t consider the Urban Heat Island effect. It almost floored me.
That’s how people used to feel about infections, until “mere man” developed antibiotics.
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