Bad Science: PhysOrg.Com Caught Serving "Science" Propaganda? You Decide

Propaganda is as old as mankind. People who have power, or who wish to be in power, have everything to gain by painting a reality that causes the masses to think and behave a certain way. Most of us know that mainstream news--as reported in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television--is often heavily slanted toward a particular point of view. A lot of "news" is, quite frankly, propaganda. We have come to expect this bias. But many of us let down our guard when reading "science news."

For example, many people go to websites such as Physorg.com fully expecting to read objective science news articles and news releases. I have quoted many articles from Physorg myself, and have found the site to provide much useful material, in the past. Imagine my surprise when clicking on a Physorg.com article entitled "Solar evidence points to human causes of climate change", to find a classic propaganda piece, instead of a scientific report substantiating the title.

When skeptical as to the veracity of a report, first check the sourcing. You may think that Physorg.com creates its own stories, but no--like most such news reporting websites, Physorg gets most stories from other sources. In this case, the source is listed as "Harvard University." But Harvard University is not a source, it is an institution. You cannot click on "Harvard University" to find the original release. You may as well list the source as "anonymous," except--the report purportedly deals with the AAAS Annual Meeting, "held in Boston." But there are no links to the particular presentations quoted by the article. (on my own I found this Eurekalert link to the AAAS Annual Meeting News--but so far have not found any reports that match the Physorg article)

Looking further in the article, astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas is quoted, apparently recanting her global warming heresy.

“Did the sun cause what we see on the ground?” she asked. “It doesn’t seem so. But there is some fuzziness in the data, which suggests it could go either way. The answer isn’t known at this time.”

The quote appears incomplete, and is not consistent with Baliunas' overall work, up to the present time. Clearly, the article is leaving something out--quoting Baliunas out of context. But where is the context, the rest of the quote? Where is the sourcing?

The article includes cryptic "quote snips" from David Hathaway:

“Our star, the sun, is a variable star,” said David H. Hathaway, a sunspot specialist from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Hunstville, Alabama. “It varies by about one-tenth of one percent” in energy output. But “there are suggestions the sun" varies "more than that, because we see it has gone through some periods, such as the Maunder minimum.” During the Maunder minimum, which lasted from 1645 to 1715 and is also known as the Little Ice Age, there was an absence or near-absence of sunpots and northern Europe experienced especially cold winters.

...and a very short snip from Baliunas:

There is considerable variability in the 60 sunlike stars she has examined, she said, depending on how fast each rotates and other factors.Unfortunately, she added, “there is no model to explain [solar surface activity] on the century-to-millennium time scale,” and long-term changes in solar output need further study.

Finally, comes the extended summary, tying everything together. Since the article is purportedly about the sun's effect--or lack of effect--on climate, we would expect a solar expert to be allowed to sum up the evidence, to put the final "spin" on the topic. But what "solar expert" did Physorg.com choose to put in the driver's seat?

Caspar Amman, a former student of "Hockey Stick" Michael Mann. Amman is not a solar scientist or astrophysicist. Rather he is a climate modeler with a homepage at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. A climate modeler on the "Hockey Team." Someone with a clear historical link to the discredited Hockey Stick view of climate made so famous by Al Gore. Why would Amman be given the final word on the topic of solar effects on climate--not his area of expertise?

One might wonder. But Amman did not waste the opportunity, not at all.

global warming is occurring at an incredibly rapid rate, faster than any previous episodes of climate change known from the paleo-climate data. Ammann did add, however, that there is reason to hope that the most dire consequences can be avoided. Although it’s clearly too late to avoid the heating of the earth’s atmosphere, “we can substantially cut [it]” by severely reducing the amounts of carbon dioxide going into the air. “It is absolutely achievable,” he said — if by mid-century societies can generate enough will to make the necessary changes.

Amman--a consummate team player--delivers for the team once again.

Where did this article come from? It appears to make the claim that it is based on a presentation (or multiple presentations) at a symposium as part of this year's AAAS meetings in Boston. But how could one tell what it is based on, from the article itself? One cannot. This is sloppy reporting at best, and a transparent attempt at climate propaganda at worst. Which is it? You decide.



Al Gore understood propaganda when he was US Vice President. That is why when he controlled billions of dollars in research fund allocation, he shunted the money to organisations such as NASA Goddard, full of people he could trust to make "the right kind of news."

There have always been plenty of environmental religionists in academia, but Al Gore is the one who gave them billions of dollars to play with, while excluding all “contrarians” from his largesse. As vice president over the eight years when global warming hysteria first made climate science a funding priority, Al Gore allocated every dime. This was his portfolio as President Clinton's climate science czar. With over ten billion dollars to spend (a huge amount for academia), Al Gore created the current climate science industry almost from scratch, transforming what had been a small backwater discipline into a juggernaut of his own framing.

The funding amounts have since multiplied several times, all of it channeled through the religious ideologues that Al Gore originally empowered, men like NASA scientists James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt, two of the most self-conscious frauds in the history of science, all for what they truly believe to be the best of all possible reasons: saving the environment from human economic activity.___ErrorTheory_via_TomNelson

Professional risk analysts--insurance actuaries--are giving climate change short shrift (via TomNelson) on a relative scale of risks. Is it possible that actuaries are looking at the issue a bit more clearly than the climate modelers--who have to paint a grim picture to keep the grants coming? An interesting thought.

I am saving the best part for last--but you will have to do the work. Contrast this PDF document by David Archibald, looking at solar cycles 24 and 25 in relation to near future climate, with the sloppy Physorg.com report above. Where can you find the "meat" as opposed to the "fluff?"

Solar effects on climate cannot be dismissed so easily as Physorg.com appears to believe. The debate is just beginning.

Waiting for Apocalypse

The demise of two recent frontrunners in the race to apocalypse--peak oil and global warming--appears to place doomseekers in a curious position. Waiting for an apocalypse that may not appear in their lifetime. Imagine the disappointment! Peak oil has always been a long shot, but why has the global warming doomsday been cancelled?

The High Court in London recently ordered the British Government to correct nine of the 36 serious errors in Al Gore’s climate movie before innocent pupils were exposed to it. It was Gore who, in 1994, announced that Mars was covered in canals full of water. This notion had been disproved before his birth. It was Gore who recently spent $4 million of the profits from his sci-fi comedy horror movie on a luxury condo just feet from the supposedly rising ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco. No surprise that he and the mad scientists with whom he has close financial and political links are under investigation for racketeering -- peddling a false prospectus to investors in his “green” investment corporation by distorting climate science even after the UK judge’s ruling.

It is not so well known that the UN’s [IPCC] climate reports are also error-packed and misleading.

.....global temperatures were warmer than today in the medieval warm period. It overlooks the dozens of peer-reviewed papers that establish this fact, and continues to rely on the bogus and now-discredited “hockey-stick” graph by which its previous assessment in 2001 had tried to rewrite history.

It was also warmer than today in Roman times, and in the Minoan warm period or Holocene climate optimum, when temperatures were warmer than today for 2000 years in the Bronze Age, firing the emergence of great civilizations worldwide. In each of the four previous interglacial periods, temperatures were 10F warmer than today’s. For most of the past half billion years, temperatures were nearly always 12.5F warmer than the present. So the warming that has now stopped (there has been no statistically significant warming since 1998) was well within the natural variability of the climate.

....The UN’s computer models predict that in the tropics the rate of increase in temperature five miles above the surface will be three times the rate of increase down here. But 50 years of atmospheric measurement, first by balloon-borne radiosondes and then by satellites, show that the air above the tropics is not merely failing to warm at three times the surface rate: for 25 years it has been cooling. The absence of the tropical mid-troposphere “hot-spot” indicates that the computer models -- expensive guesswork -- on which the UN’s rickety case is founded are, in a fundamental way, misunderstanding the way the atmosphere behaves (Douglass & Knox, 2004; Douglass et al., 2007).

On top of the “radiative forcings” from greenhouse gases, the UN says the mere fact of temperature change will cause more change still, through what it calls “feedbacks.” The UN has hiked the feedback multiplier by more than 52 percent since its 1995 report, without quite saying why. Shaviv (2006) and Schwartz (2007) calculate that the sum total of all feedbacks is either nil or very small; Wentz et al. (2007) report that the UN has missed out two-thirds of the cooling effect of evaporation in its assessment of the water-vapor feedback; Spencer (2007) finds that the cloud albedo feedback, which the UN says is strongly positive, is in fact negative; Ahlbeck (2004, 2005) says the CO2 feedback has been enormously exaggerated.....Schulte (2008: in press) reviewed 539 papers on “global climate change” in the scientific journals. Only one paper mentioned that “global warming” might be catastrophic, and even that paper offered not a shred of evidence for the supposed apocalypse.

Hawaii Reporter via Icecap and Tom Nelson

To top it off, solar cycles are lengthening--which is generally a sign of a cooler climate to come. Is the coming apocalypse to be an ice age???

"By the mid-21st century the planet will face another Little Ice Age, similar to the Maunder Minimum, because the amount of solar radiation hitting the Earth has been constantly decreasing since the 1990s and will reach its minimum approximately in 2041," he said.

The Maunder Minimum occurred between 1645 and 1715, when only about 50 spots appeared on the Sun, as opposed to the typical 40,000-50,000 spots.

It coincided with the middle and coldest part of the so called Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to bitterly cold winters.

Dalton Minimum ReturnsSolar activity is beginning to resemble pre-Maunder activity. We are only now recovering from Maunder, so if you like winter year round, you should be pleased.

Al Gore in Deadly Peril of Nasty Splinters from Riding His Magic Hockey Stick

Anyone who watched "An Inconvenient Truth" may recall Al Gore's death-defying stunt on the hydraulic lift, where he rides up into the sky tracing the curve of Michael Mann's famous hockey stick. This same hockey stick had been proven wrong years before Gore's film was released, but Al Gore has never allowed inconvenient truths to stand in the way of a good stunt.

Here is a fascinating addendum to the "magic hockey stick" tale: Steve McIntyre, one of the Canadians who demolished Michael Mann's CAGW hockey stick, has gone into the field to collect tree ring samples from some of the same bristlecone pines that Mann and others based their hockey stick research on--the wood that Michael Mann used to build his hockey stick. Michael Mann and his friends claim that updating their proxies of bristlecones to compare with 1980--2006 temperatures would be too expensive--prohibitively expensive! But is that the truth?

If you care about sorting out the huge mess that Michael Mann and his unscrupulous climate modeling friends have made, that Al Gore has unscrupulously ridden to sainthood, check out McIntyre's posting describing his "massively expensive" field trip.

To make a long story short, last summer, when my wife and I visited my sister in Colorado Springs and I thought that it would be rather fun to test the Starbucks Hypothesis and I gave a bit of a teaser report in late July, promising some further reports in a few weeks, but I got distracted by the Hansen stuff. At the time, I mentioned that, together with CA reader Pete Holzmann and his wife Leslie, we visited some bristlecones in the Mt Almagre area west of Colorado Springs.

But I have a little secret which I’ll share with you as long as you promise not to tell anyone: our objective was to locate the precise site sampled by Graybill. Not just that. Prior to the trip, I obtained a permit from the U.S. Forest Service to take dendrochronological samples from bristlecones on Mount Almagre and we did more than look at pretty views; we obtained up-to-date bristlecone samples. I only went up Almagre on the first day. Our permit lasted a month and Pete and Leslie spent two more days on Almagre, finally locating and sampling tagged Graybill trees on the third day.

Altogether (and primarily through the efforts of Pete and Leslie), our project collected 64 cores from 45 different trees at 5 different locations on Mount Almagre. 17 Graybill trees were identified, of which 9 were resampled.

Climate Audit

Please read the entire posting above, if you are at all interested in how climate science should be done, rather than the sleazy, high priced way it is actually done. Michael Mann, James Hansen, and others have a great deal to answer for. No doubt they wish that all the skeptics, heretics, and court jesters would simply go away. That is not going to happen.

For those of you who think global warming alarmism is the best way to clean up the environment--regardless of truth or falsity of its claims, regardless of the soundness of its methodology--shame on you. Bad science helps no one. The backlash will be far worse than simply trying to find the truth in the first place.

Burning the Heretics Part II

"The debate is over, let the trials begin":

With the debate now settled, what are we to do with those scientific heretics (deniers is a much too mild a term for these dangerous individuals) who continue in their error and refuse to accept the teachings of the UN's ecumenical council of scientists. David Roberts has already called for climate change heretics to be put on trial, but he goes too far as he appears to want to punish people for heretical statements they made prior to the issuance of the latest UN writ. After all, as the earlier pronouncements from the UN's ecumenical council were not as definitive as the current one and the debate not yet closed, these unfortunate souls must be given a chance to repent from their errors before they are punished.

Following enlightened historical precedence (see Galileo), I humbly suggest that the UN create an office to be known as the Permanent Tribunal of Universal Inquiry to investigate into the views of scientists on climate change. Those who publicly repent from their errors would be given leniency, but those who maintain their heretical positions should be handed over to civil authorities for proper punishment. In times past the penalty for the crime of heresy was burning at the stake but, regretfully, this would release too many greenhouse gases, so another form of punishment must be found.

Lord Monckton should be one of the first of the heretics to be brought in front of the tribunal of inquiry. I cite his recent critique of the IPCC report only as evidence with which he condemns himself. He has had the audacity to continue to publish his heretical views even after he was duly informed that the debate was officially over. His critique of the IPCC report is comprehensive and it could cause weaker minds to question the infallibility of the IPCC.

....[and there is] Dr. Edward Wegman, professor at the Centre for Computational Statistics at George Mason University and chairman of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. Dr. Wegman's crime is that he verified the McIntyre and McKitrick critique of Michael Mann's famous "hockey stick" graph, and has also complained that climate change scientists have routinely made basic statistical errors and insists that climate scientists actually consult with professional statisticians when using statistics in their work. I do note that the IPCC, quietly and without comment, has dropped the use of Dr. Mann's graph from its latest report. The IPCC's current global temperature graph, which only starts in 1850, will hopefully stop all the embarrassing distractions on the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

Then there is Dr. Henrik Svensmark, director of the Centre for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish Space Research Institute. Dr. Svensmark presents an alternate theory on climate change that involves the sun's magnetic field, cosmic rays and cloud formation. Dr. Svensmark has even conducted experimentation to support his theory. As the IPCC report concedes that cloud formation and feedback remains a major source of uncertainty and its discussion of the role of the sun is limited to solar irradiance, it is clear that an alternative theory that attacks the weakest parts of the IPCC dogma must be silenced.

An what are we to do about Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the Russian Academies of Sciences' Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg and head of the International Space Station's Astrometry project? He comes to the puzzling conclusion that the simultaneous global warming on Mars, where there are no man-made (or martian-made) greenhouse gases, shows shows that the sun rather than man's industrial activity, is the main cause of warming on the Earth. The very fact that the IPCC report did not address Mars warming shows how irrelevant this argument is for global warming on the Earth. Another of his heresies is that the IPCC has the cause and effect backwards, that it is the Earth's warming that causing the release of CO2 from the world's oceans, rather than rising CO2 causing the warming. He also points out the surface layers of the world's oceans are actually cooling. Allowing the dissemination of such information will only cause confusion.

Source.

Another interesting skeptical look at the recent IPCC political summary for policy makers comes from the erudite President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus.

Indeed, I never measure the thickness of ice in Antarctica. I really don't know how to do it and don't plan to learn it. However, as a scientifically oriented person, I know how to read science reports about these questions, for example about ice in Antarctica. I don't have to be a climate scientist myself to read them. And inside the papers I have read, the conclusions we may see in the media simply don't appear. But let me promise you something: this topic troubles me which is why I started to write an article about it last Christmas. The article expanded and became a book. In a couple of months, it will be published. One chapter out of seven will organize my opinions about the climate change.

Source.

Whether by burning, banishment, or simply ignoring what they say--it is simply too important an issue to allow the heretics to speak out publicly. The high inquisition of the climate orthodoxy simply cannot allow it.

Statistical Ignoramuses Overload Climate Science

In modern scientific studies, it is important that competent statisticians have input into the data analysis phase. In climate science, many researchers seem to have forgotten that basic step. As a result, much of what most journalists and members of the public believe has been "proven" about climate change, is simply wrong.

Dr. Wegman is a professor at the Center for Computational Statistics at George Mason University, chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, and board member of the American Statistical Association. Few statisticians in the world have CVs to rival his (excerpts appear nearby).

Wegman became involved in the global-warming debate after the energy and commerce committee of the U.S. House of Representatives asked him to assess one of the hottest debates in the global-warming controversy: the statistical validity of work by Michael Mann. You may not have heard of Mann or read Mann's study but you have often heard its famous conclusion: that the temperature increases that we have been experiencing are "likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years" and that the "1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year" of the millennium. You may have also heard of Mann's hockey-stick shaped graph, which showed relatively stable temperatures over most of the last millennium (the hockey stick's long handle), followed by a sharp increase (the hockey stick's blade) this century.

Mann's findings were arguably the single most influential study in swaying the public debate, and in 2001 they became the official view of the International Panel for Climate Change, the UN body that is organizing the worldwide effort to combat global warming. But Mann's work also had its critics, particularly two Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who published peer-reviewed critiques of their own.

Wegman accepted the energy and commerce committee's assignment, and agreed to assess the Mann controversy pro bono. He conducted his third-party review by assembling an expert panel of statisticians, who also agreed to work pro bono. Wegman also consulted outside statisticians, including the Board of the American Statistical Association. At its conclusion, the Wegman review entirely vindicated the Canadian critics and repudiated Mann's work.

Source.

You may remember that "hockey stick" graph from Al Gore's unintentionally comedic documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." Dr. Wegman apparently confirmed the McIntyre and McKitrick paper that revealed Mann's hockey stick as garbage science. Al Gore was a bit slow on the uptake, and even the IPCC still releases statements based upon the phony hockey stick claims.

Here are links to a series from the National Post on science skeptics of the orthodox doctrine of CAGW--catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. It's really more fun to be a skeptic--especially when the orthodoxy is as dimwitted as this one seems to be.

The entire series is well worth reading:

Statistics needed -- The Deniers Part I

Warming is real -- and has benefits -- The Deniers Part II

The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science -- The Deniers Part III

Polar scientists on thin ice -- The Deniers Part IV

The original denier: into the cold -- The Deniers Part V

The sun moves climate change -- The Deniers Part VI

Will the sun cool us? -- The Deniers Part VII

The limits of predictability -- The Deniers Part VIII

Look to Mars for the truth on global warming -- The Deniers Part IX

Limited role for C02 -- the Deniers Part X

Dr. Shariv's digging led him to the surprising discovery that there is no concrete evidence -- only speculation -- that man-made greenhouse gases cause global warming. Even research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-- the United Nations agency that heads the worldwide effort to combat global warming -- is bereft of anything here inspiring confidence. In fact, according to the IPCC's own findings, man's role is so uncertain that there is a strong possibility that we have been cooling, not warming, the Earth. Unfortunately, our tools are too crude to reveal what man's effect has been in the past, let alone predict how much warming or cooling we might cause in the future.

All we have on which to pin the blame on greenhouse gases, says Dr. Shaviv, is "incriminating circumstantial evidence," which explains why climate scientists speak in terms of finding "evidence of fingerprints." Circumstantial evidence might be a fine basis on which to justify reducing greenhouse gases, he adds, "without other 'suspects.' " However, Dr. Shaviv not only believes there are credible "other suspects," he believes that at least one provides a superior explanation for the 20th century's warming.

"Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming," he states, particularly because of the evidence that has been accumulating over the past decade of the strong relationship that cosmic- ray flux has on our atmosphere. So much evidence has by now been amassed, in fact, that "it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist."

The sun's strong role indicates that greenhouse gases can't have much of an influence on the climate -- that C02 et al. don't dominate through some kind of leveraging effect that makes them especially potent drivers of climate change. The upshot of the Earth not being unduly sensitive to greenhouse gases is that neither increases nor cutbacks in future C02 emissions will matter much in terms of the climate.

Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, for example, "will not dramatically increase the global temperature," Dr. Shaviv states. Put another way: "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant."

Hat tip Climate Audit Blog.

Global Warming--Not Just an Orthodoxy, It's An Adventure!

The theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) has become accepted orthodoxy by much of the general public, also by those whose income is based on the orthodoxy (think high priests), and other politicians.

But something interesting happened on the way to the anthropogenic climatic end of the world. The oceans started to cool. The satellite readings of tropospheric temperature trends diverged from surface temperature measurements. And people who are savvy in mathematics and statistics started looking closely at the sloppy methodology of the GCM multi-decadal trend climate modelers. That is what is happening over at Climate Audit blog right now. They are having a raucous--no, an adventurous--debate over the methodology of James Hansen's recent "rushed to press to beat the elections" paper in PNAC.

If you really want to think about the underpinnings of CAGW, and not simply go along with the crowd, go here and here, and read the articles and comments. If you just want to believe what everyone else believes, do not bother. It will not be worth your time and mental distress.

But if you believe that science should be a mental adventure, as I do, the issue is far from settled. In fact, the debate is only just beginning. Follow the links to Climate Science and Climate Audit and you will find fascinating discussions--the back and forth of genuine debate--that has been lost from more mainstream discussions of orthodox political views of climate.

If you browse the sidebar of Al Fin blog, you will find several other links to unorthodox views of the climate. True believer sites like realclimate etc. are a dime a dozen, and censor their comments closely to shut out heretics and infidels. If you are a special type of person who enjoys a rowdy debate the way science was meant to be, try something different.

Here is one of the reasons Hansen felt he needed to convince his friends to publish his rather confused article so hastily: storm clouds on the horizon.

The “hockey stick” was completely and thoroughly broken once and for all in 2006. Several years ago, two Canadian researchers tore apart the statistical foundation for the hockey stick. In 2006, both the National Academy of Sciences and an independent researcher further refuted the foundation of the “hockey stick.” http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=257697

The National Academy of Sciences report reaffirmed the existence of the Medieval Warm Period from about 900 AD to 1300 AD and the Little Ice Age from about 1500 to 1850. Both of these periods occurred long before the invention of the SUV or human industrial activity could have possibly impacted the Earth’s climate. In fact, scientists believe the Earth was warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings grew crops in Greenland.

Climate alarmists have been attempting to erase the inconvenient Medieval Warm Period from the Earth’s climate history for at least a decade. David Deming, an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma’s College of Geosciences, can testify first hand about this effort. Dr. Deming was welcomed into the close-knit group of global warming believers after he published a paper in 1995 that noted some warming in the 20th century. Deming says he was subsequently contacted by a prominent global warming alarmist and told point blank “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” When the “Hockey Stick” first appeared in 1998, it did just that.

....One of the ways alarmists have pounded this mantra of “consensus” on global warming into our pop culture is through the use of computer models which project future calamity. But the science is simply not there to place so much faith in scary computer model scenarios which extrapolate the current and projected buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and conclude that the planet faces certain doom.

Dr. Vincent Gray, a research scientist and a 2001 reviewer with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has noted, “The effects of aerosols, and their uncertainties, are such as to nullify completely the reliability of any of the climate models.”

Earlier this year, the director of the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks Alaska, testified to Congress that highly publicized climate models showing a disappearing Arctic were nothing more than “science fiction.” In fact, after years of hearing about the computer generated scary scenarios about the future of our planet, I now believe that the greatest climate threat we face may be coming from alarmist computer models.

This threat is originating from the software installed on the hard drives of the publicity seeking climate modelers.

It is long past the time for us to separate climate change fact from hysteria.

....Here is a quote from Newsweek magazine:

“There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production– with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth.”

A headline in the New York Times reads: “Climate Changes Endanger World’s Food Output.” Here is a quote from Time Magazine:

“As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval.”

All of this sounds very ominous. That is, until you realize that the three quotes I just read were from articles in 1975 editions of Newsweek Magazine and The New York Times, and Time Magazine in 1974. http://time-proxy.yaga.com/time/archive/printout/0,23657,944914,00.html

They weren’t referring to global warming; they were warning of a coming ice age.

Let me repeat, all three of those quotes were published in the 1970’s and warned of a coming ice age.

In addition to global cooling fears, Time Magazine has also reported on global warming. Here is an example:

“[Those] who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right… weathermen have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.”

Before you think that this is just another example of the media promoting Vice President Gore’s movie, you need to know that the quote I just read you from Time Magazine was not a recent quote; it was from January 2, 1939.

Yes, in 1939. Nine years before Vice President Gore was born and over three decades before Time Magazine began hyping a coming ice age and almost five decades before they returned to hyping global warming.

Time Magazine in 1951 pointed to receding permafrost in Russia as proof that the planet was warming.

In 1952, the New York Times noted that the “trump card” of global warming “has been the melting glaciers.”

BUT MEDIA COULD NOT DECIDE BETWEEN WARMING OR COOLING SCARES

There are many more examples of the media and scientists flip-flopping between warming and cooling scares.

Here is a quote from the New York Times reporting on fears of an approaching ice age.

“Geologists Think the World May be Frozen Up Again.”

That sentence appeared over 100 years ago in the February 24, 1895 edition of the New York Times.

Let me repeat. 1895, not 1995.

A front page article in the October 7, 1912 New York Times, just a few months after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, declared that a prominent professor “Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age.”

The very same day in 1912, the Los Angeles Times ran an article warning that the “Human race will have to fight for its existence against cold.” An August 10, 1923 Washington Post article declared: “Ice Age Coming Here.”

By the 1930’s, the media took a break from reporting on the coming ice age and instead switched gears to promoting global warming:

“America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise” stated an article in the New York Times on March 27, 1933. The media of yesteryear was also not above injecting large amounts of fear and alarmism into their climate articles.

An August 9, 1923 front page article in the Chicago Tribune declared:

“Scientist Says Arctic Ice Will Wipe Out Canada.” The article quoted a Yale University professor who predicted that large parts of Europe and Asia would be “wiped out” and Switzerland would be “entirely obliterated.”

A December 29, 1974 New York Times article on global cooling reported that climatologists believed “the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade.”

The article also warned that unless government officials reacted to the coming catastrophe, “mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence” would result. In 1975, the New York Times reported that “A major cooling [was] widely considered to be inevitable.” These past predictions of doom have a familiar ring, don’t they? They sound strikingly similar to our modern media promotion of former Vice president’s brand of climate alarmism.

After more than a century of alternating between global cooling and warming, one would think that this media history would serve a cautionary tale for today’s voices in the media and scientific community who are promoting yet another round of eco-doom.

Much of the 100-year media history on climate change that I have documented here today can be found in a publication titled “Fire and Ice” from the Business and Media Institute. http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/fireandice_timeswarns.asp

MEDIA COVERAGE IN 2006

Which raises the question: Has this embarrassing 100-year documented legacy of coverage on what turned out to be trendy climate science theories made the media more skeptical of today’s sensational promoters of global warming?

You be the judge.

On February 19th of this year, CBS News’s “60 Minutes” produced a segment on the North Pole. The segment was a completely one-sided report, alleging rapid and unprecedented melting at the polar cap. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/16/60minutes/main1323169.shtml

It even featured correspondent Scott Pelley claiming that the ice in Greenland was melting so fast, that he barely got off an ice-berg before it collapsed into the water.

“60 Minutes” failed to inform its viewers that a 2005 study by a scientist named Ola Johannessen and his colleagues showing that the interior of Greenland is gaining ice and mass and that according to scientists, the Arctic was warmer in the 1930’s than today.

On March 19th of this year “60 Minutes” profiled NASA scientist and alarmist James Hansen, who was once again making allegations of being censored by the Bush administration. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/17/60minutes/main1415985.shtml

In this segment, objectivity and balance were again tossed aside in favor of a one-sided glowing profile of Hansen.

The “60 Minutes” segment made no mention of Hansen’s partisan ties to former Democrat Vice President Al Gore or Hansen’s receiving of a grant of a quarter of a million dollars from the left-wing Heinz Foundation run by Teresa Heinz Kerry. There was also no mention of Hansen’s subsequent endorsement of her husband John Kerry for President in 2004. http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/dai_complete.pdf

Many in the media dwell on any industry support given to so-called climate skeptics, but the same media completely fail to note Hansen’s huge grant from the left-wing Heinz Foundation. http://www.heinzawards.net/speechDetail.asp?speechID=6

The foundation’s money originated from the Heinz family ketchup fortune. So it appears that the media makes a distinction between oil money and ketchup money.

“60 Minutes” also did not inform viewers that Hansen appeared to concede in a 2003 issue of Natural Science that the use of “extreme scenarios" to dramatize climate change “may have been appropriate at one time” to drive the public's attention to the issue. http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-16/ns_jeh6.html

Why would “60 Minutes” ignore the basic tenets of journalism, which call for objectivity and balance in sourcing, and do such one-sided segments? The answer was provided by correspondent Scott Pelley. Pelley told the CBS News website that he justified excluding scientists skeptical of global warming alarmism from his segments because he considers skeptics to be the equivalent of “Holocaust deniers.” http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2006/03/22/publiceye/entry1431768.shtml

This year also saw a New York Times reporter write a children’s book entitled” The North Pole Was Here.” The author of the book, New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, wrote that it may someday be “easier to sail to than stand on” the North Pole in summer. So here we have a very prominent environmental reporter for the New York Times who is promoting aspects of global warming alarmism in a book aimed at children. And so on.

Why is the media in the catastrophe business? Would not reporting the news be enough? Apparently not. Reporting the news does not provide the media insiders enough clout. They have decided to shade the news a bit--okay, a lot. Expect a lot more of this type of thing from the media, until things start going more the way they like politically.