To the dismay of green-oriented psychologists, seeing and hearing a lone skeptic for as little as 45 seconds in a “balanced” news story on global warming is enough to erode viewers’ confidence in the anthropogenic global warming theory. The solution? No more dissenting views. They are far too powerful, evidently. Hence, the common phrases “global warming deniers,” “the debate is over” and “the science is settled.” These are all attempts to stifle or dismiss even a peep from a questioning voice, because just 45 seconds of questioning can upset the tenuous belief some hold in man-made global warming alarmism.

The American Psychological Association wants Congress to give them tax-dollars to work with other organizations in developing media messages targeting behavior changes. Specifically they want to get people to reduce their “carbon footprint.” Keeping the other side of the debate out of sight looks to be a critical piece of their psychological puzzle.

According to a recent story in USA Today, 16,000 members of the American Psychological Association are just wrapping up a four-day conference in Boston. Hot topics include changing what America eats and how to produce better agitprop to bolster belief in global warming, and foster carbon-targeted behavior changes. One proposed strategy is encouraging students to rebuke fellows they observe engaging in “non-sustainable” behavior, like failing to recycle. Psychologists observe that people are more likely to actively disapprove of such behavior if it is perceived as more harmful. This is an old, time-tested strategy. Researchers at the conference are calling it “increasing sensitivity to the natural world.” It’s more commonly known as demonizing.

By far, the most telling piece of research presented at the conference was put together by Stanford social psychologist, Jon Krosnik. He concludes that news stories presenting a “balanced” view of global warming reduced viewers’ belief that humans are at fault and also reduced the number of people who thought climate change would be bad.

Details on the experiment from the USA Today story: “By editing CNN and PBS news stories so that some saw a skeptic included in the report, others saw a story in which the skeptic was edited out and another group saw no video, Krosnick found that adding 45 seconds of a skeptic to one news story caused 11% of Americans to shift their opinions about the scientific consensus. Rather than 58% believing a perceived scientific agreement, inclusion of the skeptic caused the perceived amount of agreement to drop to 47%.”

Every day, Americans are bombarded with the message of global-warming alarmism. From the TV news casts, car and light bulb commercials, newspaper articles and editorials, radio announcements to sitcoms and films, America is deluged with thousands of hours of anthropogenic global warming propaganda. Going by Krosnik’s research, 45 seconds of skepticism is all it takes to shatter majority status for global warming believers. Truth is indeed a powerful thing.

by Walter Cunningham

NASA has played a key role in one of the greatest periods of scientific progress in history. It is uniquely positioned to collect the most comprehensive data on our biosphere.

For example, recently generated NASA data enabled scientists to finally understand the Gulf Stream warming mechanism and its effect on European weather. Such data will allow us to improve our models, resulting in better seasonal forecasts.

NASA’s Aqua satellite is showing that water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, works to offset the effect of carbon dioxide (CO2). This information, contrary to the assumption used in all the warming models, is ignored by global warming alarmists.

Climate understanding and critical decision making require comprehensive data about our planet’s land, sea, and atmosphere. Without an adequate satellite system to provide such data, policy efforts and monitoring international environmental agreements are doomed to failure. Our satellite monitoring capability is being crippled by interagency wrangling and federal budget issues. As much as a third of our satellites need replacing in the next couple of years.
NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused, or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Unfortunately, it is becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science. Advocacy is replacing objective evaluation of data, while scientific data is being ignored in favor of emotions and politics.

There are excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the Sun and the Earth’s temperature, while scientists cannot find a relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption, and global temperatures. But global warming is an issue no longer being decided in the scientific arena.

Saying the Earth is warming is to state the obvious. Since the end of the ice age, the Earth’s temperature has increased approximately 16 degrees Fahrenheit and sea levels have risen a total of 300 feet. That is certain and measurable evidence of warming, but it is not evidence of AGW—human-caused warming.

We can track the temperature of the Earth back for millennia. Knowing the temperature of the Earth, past or present, is a matter of collecting data, analyzing it, and coming up with the best answer to account for the data. Collecting such data on a global basis is a NASA forte.

I believe in global climate change, but there is no way that humans can influence the temperature of our planet to any measurable degree with the tools currently at their disposal. Any human contribution to global temperature change is lost in the noise of terrestrial and cosmic factors.

Our beautiful home planet has been warming and cooling for the last 4.8 billion years. Most recently, it has been warming—be it ever so slightly—but there is nothing unusual about it! The changes and rates of change in the Earth’s temperature, just since the Industrial Revolution, have occurred many times in our climatic history. While climate scientists generally agree that the Earth’s temperature is always changing, not many of them would say that humans are responsible for those changes.

None of this is to say there are not legitimate reasons to restrict emissions of any number of chemicals into the atmosphere. We should just not fool ourselves into thinking we will change the temperature of the Earth by doing so.

In a December 2007 Senate report, 400 prominent scientists signed a letter pointing out that climate change was a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it. Their ranks included experts in climatology, geology, oceanography, biology, glaciology, biogeography, meteorology, economics, chemistry, mathematics, environmental sciences, engineering, physics, and paleo-climatology. Their message: When changes are gradual, man has an almost infinite ability to adapt and evolve.

The fearmongers of global warming base their case on the correlation between CO2 and global temperature, even though we cannot be sure which is cause and which is effect. Historically, temperature increases have preceded high CO2 levels, and there have been periods when atmospheric CO2 levels were as much as 16 times what they are now, periods characterized not by warming but by glaciation. You might have to go back half a million years to match our current level of atmospheric CO2, but you only have to go back to the Medieval Warming Period, from the 10th to the 14th Century, to find an intense global warming episode, followed immediately by the drastic cooling of the Little Ice Age. Neither of these events were caused by variations in CO2 levels.

Even though CO2 is a relatively minor constituent of “greenhouse gases,” alarmists have made it the whipping boy for global warming (probably because they know how fruitless it would be to propose controlling other principal constituents, H2O, CH4, and N2O). Since human activity does contribute a tiny portion of atmospheric CO2, they blame us for global warming.

Other inconvenient facts ignored by the activists: Carbon dioxide is a nonpolluting gas, essential for plant photosynthesis. Higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere produce bigger harvests.

In spite of warnings of severe consequences from rising seas, droughts, severe weather, species extinction, and other disasters, the U.S. has not been stampeded into going along with the recommendations of the UN Panel on Climate Change—so far. Even though evidence supports the American position, we have begun to show signs of caving in to the alarmists.

With scientific evidence going out of style, emotional arguments and anecdotal data are ruling the day. The media subjects us to one frightening image of environmental nightmare after another, linking each to global warming. Journalists and activist scientists use hurricanes, wildfires, and starving polar bears to appeal to our emotions, not to our reason. They are far more concerned with anecdotal observations, such as the frozen sea ice inside the Arctic Circle, than they are with understanding why it is happening and how frequently it has occurred in the past.

After warnings that 2007 would be the hottest year on record and a record year for hurricanes, what we experienced was the coolest year since 2001 and, by some measures, the most benign hurricane season in the Northern Hemisphere in three decades.

Even though recent changes in our atmosphere are all within the bounds of the Earth’s natural variability, a growing number of people are willing to throw away trillions of dollars on fruitless solutions. Why do we allow emotional appeals and anecdotal data to shape our conclusions and influence our expenditures with the science and technology we have available at our fingertips?

The situation is complex, but the sad state of scientific literacy in America today is partially to blame for belief in AGW. When a 2006 National Science Foundation survey found 25 percent of Americans not knowing the Earth revolves around the Sun, you know that science education is at a new low and society is vulnerable to the emotional appeal of AGW. And don’t underestimate the role of politics and political correctness.

The public debate should focus on the real cause of global temperature change and whether we can do anything about it. Is global warming a natural inevitability, or is it AGW—human caused?

The conflict over AGW has deteriorated into a religious war; a war between true believers in human-caused global warming and nonbelievers; between those who accept AGW on faith and those who consider themselves more sensible and better informed. “True believers” are beyond being interested in evidence; it is impossible to reason a person out of positions they have not been reasoned into.

It doesn’t help that NASA scientist James Hansen was one of the early alarmists claiming humans caused global warming. Hansen is a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradict him.

Warming in the upper atmosphere should occur before any surface warming effect, but NASA’s own data show that has not been happening. Global temperature readings—accurate to 0.1 degree Celsius—are gathered by orbiting satellites. Interestingly, in the 18 years those satellites have been recording global temperatures, they have actually shown a slight decrease in average temperatures.

Hansen is currently calling for a reduction of atmospheric CO2 by 10 percent and a moratorium on coal-fired power plants, while claiming the Bush administration is censoring him. Other so-called scientists are saying the world must bring carbon emissions to near zero to keep temperatures from rising.

In today’s politically correct environment, many are reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom; when they do, they are frequently ignored. When NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, Hansen’s boss and a distinguished scientist in his own right, attempted to draw a distinction between Hansen’s personal and political views and the science conducted by his agency, he was soon forced to back off.

It is the true believers who, when they have no facts on their side, try to silence their critics. When former NASA mathematician Ferenc Miskolczi pointed out that “greenhouse warming” may be mathematically impossible, NASA would not allow him to publish his work. Miskolczi dared to question the simplifying assumption in the warming model that the atmosphere is infinitely thick. He pointed out that when you use the correct thickness—about 65 miles—the greenhouse effect disappears! Ergo: no AGW. Miskolczi resigned in disgust and published his proof in the peerreviewed Hungarian journal Weather.

For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric CO2 has continued to accumulate—up about 4 percent in the last 10 years—the global mean temperature has remained flat. That should raise obvious questions about CO2 being the cause of climate change.

Instead, AGW enthusiasts are embracing more regulation, greater government spending, and higher taxes in a futile attempt to control what is beyond our control—the Earth’s temperature. One of their political objectives, unstated of course, is the transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations or, as the social engineers put it, from the North to the South, which may be their real agenda.

Read the rest of this article at Launch Magazine.

By Bret Stephens

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it’s time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.

What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA’s Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of “99% confidence”).

But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world’s oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that “80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters,” according to a report by NPR’s Richard Harris.

The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere’s coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.

This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn’t evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist, or that global warming isn’t happening. It does mean it isn’t science.

So let’s stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.

The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification.

Read the rest of this piece at the Wall Street Journal.

by Christopher C. Horner

Late last week, the Drudge Report amplified a “shock claim” that “for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year”. Drudge linked to the claims originally trumpeted by the UK’s fading left-wing rag The Independent.

Just for context, that is a paper that in late 2005 ran a story about me leading a Big Oil-funded global conspiracy against the Kyoto Protocol — not true, but I am willing to listen to offers — based on a cobbling of unrelated offal-smeared papers taken from my trash and given them by the dumpster divers of Greenpeace. But at least they called me first, unlike The Guardian which pulled the same stunt the same day.

This time the Indy writer also claimed “The polar regions are experiencing the most dramatic increase in average temperatures due to global warming and scientists fear that as more sea ice is lost, the darker, open ocean will absorb more heat and raise local temperatures even further.” This is what we call a lie.  Overlayed with Homeric prose, it expands to become a scare.

“The polar regions are experiencing the most dramatic increase in average temperatures due to global warming” only in computer models. These taxpayer-funded PlayStations will crank out any result – cooling or warming – that you want. Given that warming is (for now) where the money is, our modern-day Willie Suttons queue up to model warming.

In fact, the Antarctic – South Pole – is gaining ice mass, and cooling.

In truth, the North Pole has warmed, but has more ice now than a year ago. And the researcher supposedly making this claim didn’t actually make it: moreover he rushed to say that his words were being salaciously hyped.

Having once before fallen for a “North Pole is melting!” scam, even the New York Times — on its blog, mind you, no need to tamp down alarmism on its print pages – admitted that the hyperventilated headline and lede “go way beyond what Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center tells the reporter.” Serreze claimed on an alarmist blog that his actual claims “quickly grew out of all reasonable proportion,” admitting that a summer loss of ice at the North Pole “summer would be purely symbolic, but symbolism can be pretty darned powerful” (prompting an alarmist, taxpayer-servant to call on his team to invoke such stunts more often).

This is what we should expect from a press corps fully vested in the global warming industry. It has gotten so bad that in January NBC News showed a moving piece on the plight of the Antarctic, with footage of polar bears. The news would’ve been how in the world those bears got to the other side of the planet from where they really live. Outdoing itself, NBC recently also ran a piece on the Arctic, and showed us penguins. Sigh.

To show how bad things were last week, the less alarmist portrayal came from CNN. Of course, CNN made no effort to inform viewers that the “on record” they were talking about is simply since satellites began sending images in 1972. Nor did they bother with relevant details about the Northwest Passage though it was traversed regularly before the cooling that began about 1940.

Putting things in that perspective, you could say we are simply returning to what we believe was normal before the three-decade cooling that caused so much panic in the ‘70s. Oh, the humanity.  Have I mentioned the recent discovery of undersea volcanoes near the northern ice melt? Coincidence.

Read the rest of this piece at Human Events.

Christopher C. Horner is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism.

By Jon Hartzler
Ph.D. and retired science professor, Hutchinson

Global warming is a hot topic. The liberal politicians and news media stir our emotions and try to make us panic. Al Gore won an Emmy for “An Inconvenient Truth.” It’s like a piranha feeding frenzy!

In the June 10 Leader, Glenn Gruenhagen challenged the global warming “theory” but mostly warned us of upcoming legislation that might hurt the U.S. economically. Then John Lofdahl bashed Gruenhagen claiming that science supports global warming. He didn’t address the main issue of Gruenhagen’s argument, the economic impact of the political legislation that the global warming enthusiasts want.

Global warming is a complicated issue. First, is warming really happening? If it is significant, is man causing it? Finally, can man intentionally alter the climate for the good by reducing carbon dioxide?

In science, proof of an effect requires a tight experiment, including large numbers of repetitions and rigid controls. Climate has far too many variables to lend itself to this requirement for proof. We are left with what we call correlations, like increasing carbon dioxide and increasing temperature. This is not proof, only suggestive in science.

Indeed the latest scientific report (Intercontinental Report on Global Climate Change 2007) stated we are 90 percent convinced. So even the much-heralded report contains an admitted element of uncertainty on the part of the scientists who wrote it. As Gruenhagen pointed out, many scientists are skeptical. Some dissenters include world-class names, like Prof. Richard Lintzen, former director of earth and planetary physics at Harvard University and present professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, arguably the best scientific institution on the planet.

Dr. Lintzen acknowledges that the earth has warmed a fraction of a degree. But he thinks carbon dioxide may or may not be the cause. Further he notes “we don’t understand the natural internal variability of climate change.” Climate has changed dramatically in the history of the earth and the present noted tiny temperature changes may only be natural phenomena. Science cannot prove it either way.

Read the rest of this piece at the Hutchinson Leader.

Minnesota, Take Action: Write your own letter to the editor.

Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism — and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy — can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.

The NIPCC is a counter to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The group was unveiled this week in Manhattan at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, along with its scientific report claiming that natural factors — the sun, El Ninos and La Ninas, volcanoes, etc, — not human sources are behind global warming.

The Washington Post’s first instincts (not just on its opinion pages, but in its news coverage, too) were cleverly to sew doubt of the group’s credibility by pointing out to readers that many of the participants had ties to conservative politicians, such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and that the conference sponsor — the Heartland Institute — received money from oil companies and health care corporations.

That’s standard fare, and partly fair, so that’s not what I am talking about.

The insidiousness I am referring to is the unfavourable way the Post compared the NIPCC report to the IPCC’s famous report of last year.

After reminding readers that the IPCC and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work on climate change, the paper then, sneeringly, added: “While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists.”

First of all, the IPCC and Mr. Gore won the Peace Prize, not a science prize, which only proves they are good at politics. They didn’t win the Physics Prize, for instance.

Also, while the former vice-prez may have invented the Internet (by his own admission), he is demonstrably not a scientist. Yet in the same paragraph as the Washington Post lionizes Mr. Gore for his work saving the planet, it backhands non-scientists for meddling in the climate change debate, never once showing any hint it recognized its own hypocrisy.

And the paper displays its utter lack of intellectual curiosity, too.

Hundreds of scientists may have contributed bits and pieces of work to the IPCC’s gargantuan report, but just 62 wrote the chapter said to “prove” that man is behind global warming — not that many more than the 23 from the new NIPCC who the Post so snidely dismiss as inconsequential in number. And just 52 people — many of them the kind of non-scientists the Post would have us believe have no business passing judgment — wrote the IPCC’s “Summary for Policy-makers.” That’s the publication that gets all the ink and drives the climate alarmism because it contains the most provocative statements about the certainty of manmade warming.

The bias is that whatever the IPCC and its defenders claim, the Washington Post and most other outlets report without scrutiny. Meanwhile, the motives and sources of all sceptics are instantly suspected and derided.

Read the rest of the story at National Post

Kudos to KSTP-TV for finally breaking the apparent Twin Cities media boycott of GlobalClimateScam.com.  Today KSTP aired a news story on our campaign and its potentially conflict with Governor Pawlenty’s agenda.  A press release announcing the campaign was originally issued to all major Twin Cities media outlets in mid-February in conjunction with the first billboard advertisement being posted on I-94 in Albertville.  Over the past three weeks, five additional boards have been posted in and around the metro-area, but no Twin Cities media outlet elected to cover the story until now.

It’s interesting to contrast our campaign to that of a recent campaign sponsored by Progress in Motion (PIM), the transportation alliance that just helped to pass the single largest tax increase in Minnesota’s history.  Last year, PIM ran a one month campaign consisting of a single billboard touting the slogan, “No New Taxes Means No New Bridges“.  While this campaign was much smaller, both in terms of its duration and the number of billboards, most of the the Twin Cities covered the story.  This situation appears to validate the claims made in the recently released BMI report on the media’s censorship of information that contridicts the agenda of global warming alarmists.

A new report entitled “Global Warming Censored” was released today by the Business and Media Institute (BMI) exposing the media bais and censorship surrounding the global warming debate.  Consistently viewers are being sent only one message from ABC, CBS and NBC: global warming is an environmental catastrophe and it’s mankind’s fault. Skepticism is all but shut out of reports through several tactics – omission, name-calling, the hype of frightening images like polar bears scavenging for food near towns and a barrage of terrifying predictions.

Read the report by visiting BMI’s website

When it comes to Iraq, our media have been preoccupied with the issue of whether there was adequate intelligence to justify the invasion and if policy-makers made up evidence before the war. But on the matter of global intervention to stop global warming, there seems to be no need for scientific evidence to justify what is shaping up as a global carbon tax of 35 cents a gallon of gas on the American people. 

It’s difficult to figure out which is the bigger fraud-the U.N. or our media. 

Incredibly, the much-publicized United Nations climate change report, which blames global warming on people, has no published science to back it up. 

The front page Washington Post story about the report waited until the 20th paragraph of a 21-paragraph story to mention that the “detailed scientific documentation” for the claim is not yet available and won’t be released “for a few months.” 

A New York Times account waited until the 40th paragraph of a 44-paragraph story to disclose that “thousands of pages of technical background,” supposedly the basis for the alarming conclusions, would be released later in the year. 

Now how many people read until almost the end of these articles to discover that the scientific evidence is not yet available?

The odds are that many people didn’t get past the sensational New York Times headline, “Science Panel Calls Global Warming ‘Unequivocal.’”

Clearly, we are supposed to accept all of this on faith. 

Read the rest of the story at Accuracy in the Media