USA Today on Thursday devoted a front page story to defending one of the key scientists involved in November’s ClimateGate scandal.
In a piece entitled “Questions about research slow climate change efforts,” author Brian Winter — oh the irony! — omitted important information about Penn State University’s controversial global warming alarmist Michael Mann while downplaying the seriousness of the e-mail messages at the heart of the matter.
The main article also dishonestly ignored how Mann is being investigated by his own university concerning his involvement in the scandal, and actually NEVER even mentioned the scientist’s infamous “Hockey Stick” graph that has been widely discredited by climatologists and meteorologists around the world.
Instead of a fair and balanced treatment of Mann and issues related to his view of anthropogenic global warming, readers were unfortunately presented with a grossly one-sided and disingenuous report evident in the very first paragraphs.
It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago-changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.
The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media-even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC-are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.
More embarrassments for the U.N. and ’settled’ science
Wall Street Journal Editorial
It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the “settled science” of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.
First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.
Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there’s no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC’s headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.
Actor Danny Glover should probably stick to reading lines other people write for him. Speaking off the cuff, he said this of the tragic earthquake in Haiti that may have killed as many as 50,000:
“The threat of what happened to Haiti is a threat that can happen anywhere in the Caribbean, to the Island nations. You know? They are all in peril because of global warming. They are all in peril because of climate change and all this, and we need to find… When we did what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response. This is what happened, you know what I’m saying? We have to act now.”
I had to add a new category to the site to accommodate this post. None of the regular categories really seemed to quite fit. In retrospect, a lot of other stories would probably fit in there too, but it took Danny Glover to Christian the new category.
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