By Noel Sheppard, Newsbusters
Climate alarmism reached a new low Sunday as ABC’s “World News” featured a hit piece on Dr. S. Fred Singer, the esteemed Professor Emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia. In a segment disgracefully entitled “Welcome to ‘The Denial Machine,’” anchor Dan Harris disparaged Singer at every turn. With a picture of Singer behind his right shoulder, under which was displayed the words “THE SKEPTIC,” Harris began Kert Davies, an environmental activist, says Singer is connected to a whole web of organizations, many funded by oil and coal companies that have spent millions trying to convince the public there’s a real scientific debate about global warming slowing down government action on a phenomenon that could lead to storms, droughts, famines, massive refugee movements, and even wars. KERT DAVIES, GREENPEACE: That will be how people remember Fred Singer, as someone who tried to slow down the reaction to global warming and in fact, in the end, that is going to cost lives, and cause us lost species, and cost major economic damage around the world. How nice. On Easter Sunday, ABC News implied that an 84-year-old Ph.D. is thwarting science in a fashion that will cost lives.
Astounding, wouldn’t you agree? Sadly, there was more:In this new report, he argues global warming is just part of a natural cycle, and that our carbon emissions are not dangerous. We ran Singer’s data by climate scientists from Stanford, Princeton, and NASA who dismissed it with words like “fraudulent nonsense.” This is not, by the way, the first time Singer has set himself against mainstream scientific opinion. He also argued against the dangers of second-hand smoke, toxic waste, and nuclear winter. We asked Dr. Singer if he ever took money from energy companies. At first he denied it, and then he said yes he had received one unsolicited check from Exxon for $10,000. Wow. A whole $10,000?
Note: See the story posted on ABC News entitled “Global Warming Denier: Fraud or ‘Realist’?” It disgracefully began, “His fellow scientists call him a fraud, a charlatan and a showman, but Fred Singer calls himself “a realist.” This is despicable!!!
I saw the piece and it was a disgraceful piece of journalism. It was almost as if scripted by Greenpeace themselves. The alarmists and their cohorts in the media may be feeling pressure after the Morano 500, the very successful ICCC conference with over 500 in attendance, the considerable new peer-review research knocking the legs out from under the so-called consensus science models and data, and the polls showing the public beginning to show fatigue or doubt about the issue. Why didn’t Harris ask Greenpeace how much they make off their alarmism ($2-3B/year) and why that wouldn’t affect their objectivity. Also why not name the scientists who called the NIPCC report fraudulent nonsense at Stanford, Princeton and NASA. We can guess who they are and if so they would be indeed be expert on fraudulent nonsense (as practicioners). It is ironic that ABC used Greenpeace and Princeton (Michael Oppenheimer no doubt, formerly with the Environmental Defense Fund) to attack Fred. Greenpeace and the Environmental Defense Fund led the charge in the banning of DDT causing the death of tens of millions. Please if so inclined, comment back to ABC here.
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
John Coleman posted a story here on Icecap in November about the global warming SCAM that got the media’s attention. I was fortunate to be on the panel at the Heartland Institute’s ICCC with John Coleman and Art Horn, another TV meteorologist. For me it was a trip back in time. I worked with John Coleman on Good Morning America and as the First Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and Art was one of my early students when I was a professor of Meteorolpgy at Lyndon State College back when the world thought the ice age was coming. I gave my talk on the role of the sun and oceans in climate change. Art talked about the media’s motivation for their alarmist viewpoint and John talked about why he spoke out and will continue to do so.
John’s talk started: “It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; it is a SCAM. With those words, posted on the weather page of the website of the San Diego Television station where I am chief meteorologist, I came out of the closet and into the spotlight in the movement to debunk the wildly out of control, hysterical frenzy about the supposed imminent climatic catastrophe of Global Warming. And, how does it feel to be in the ring dueling it out with the global warming doomsayers? In the words of James Brown, “WOW. I feel Good.” You can read his full comments here.
He has 4 videos from KUSI on youtube. The founder of The Weather Channel speaks out against global warming Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.
By Paul, MyNews.in
When I was in sixth grade, I specifically remember reading in my science book about global cooling and the coming Ice Age. Some things change and some others never do. One thing that changes on a regular basis is science. When I started medical school, I was told that more than half of what I was taught during medical school would be proved incorrect by the end of my career. This is not an anomaly for just medicine. You see it throughout all fields of study when you are dealing with inexact sciences. The study of weather is certainly not exempt from this. If you think the people that study weather really have a firm grasp on what is going on, just watch the weather report on the local news for a few weeks and you’ll change your mind.
One thing that never changes is the desire by some to control the masses through environmental nonsense. In our current day and age, one of the ways this is manifested in the hysteria of man-made global warming. We are told that we must cut down on greenhouse gas emissions by cutting energy consumption presumptively by eliminating fossil fuel use. We are told that we must embrace “green technology” and buy hybrid cars to save the earth. This global warming hysteria continues to reach magnitude proportions in our government and has already manifested itself in a bill that permanently bans the incandescent light bulb a few years from now (sorry Edison!). Congress is pondering passing a law mandating fuel emissions to reach somewhere around 50 miles per gallon on all cars manufactured in this country. If that isn’t the quickest way to destroy the auto industry in this country, I don’t know what is.
Global warming, or global “climate change” as some like to call it is actually far from a scientific consensus. Scientists that do not prescribe to global warming are ridiculed, ostracized, and silenced. The Weather Channel founder, John Coleman, called man-made global warming the greatest scam in history. Proponents of this global warming hysteria have a specific goal of politicizing the weather, because if you can politicize the weather, you can control everyone. There’s a tornado-it must be OUR fault for global warming. There’s a tsunami-global warming. There are wildfires across California-global warming. Hurricane-global warming. Read more here.
By Alexander Cockburn in the Energy Tribune
Although the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in carbon dioxide levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy. In magazine articles and essays I have described in fairly considerable detail, with input from the scientist Martin Hertzberg, that you can account for the current warming by a number of well-known factors having to do with the elliptical course of the Earth in its relationship to the sun, the axis of the Earth in the current period, and possibly the influence of solar flares. There have been similar warming cycles in the past, such as the Medieval Warming Period, when the warming levels were considerably higher than they are now. Yet from left to right, the warming that is occurring today is taken as man-made, and many have made this opinion the central plank of their political campaigns. For reasons I find very hard to fathom, the environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can prevent or turn back the warming cycle.
This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political program. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice. This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact, play into the hands of the sinister-as-always corporate interests.
One way critics are silenced is by accusing them of ignoring “peer-reviewed science.” Yet oftentimes, peer reviews are nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable, and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers nodded through by experts and others given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Read more here.
By Michael R. Fox, Hawaii Reporter
As an attendee and speaker at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York City, I found it to be a profound experience and the best scientific meeting I had ever attended. From the President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus to John Stossel for luncheon speaker, to hundreds of scientists, economists, and world class statisticians in between, it was an intellectual feast. It was a meeting of realists.
The conference was organized by the Heartland Institute along with some 50 co-sponsors. According to Heartland’s president Joe Bast, Al Gore had been invited, and even offered his usual speaker fee of $200,000. Others from the Gore camp were also invited, yet did not show. Scientific accountability is not among their strong suits, when deceptions are so much more lucrative. Dozens of media did not take notice.
Dr. Fred Singer continued to contribute solid analyses of the global warming issues which he presented. He and 23 co-authors have written an excellent new summary. Singer introduced the recent findings of global warming complexities entitled Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate. This was the Summary for Policymakers from Singer’s new group the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change or NIPCC. The report is the perfect foil for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Summary for Policy Makers.
What many people do not appreciate is that the UN’s IPCC has been an activist program from the very beginning. It has not been devoted to better understanding of the climate, but to develop documentation “proving” only a human link (read capitalist) to climate change. Considering natural forces on climate such as the influence of the Sun were off limits. Those IPCC documents have been historically drafted by international bureaucrats to better fit the UN and the IPCC political agendas. They have been known to re-write scientific conclusions without knowledge or approval of the originating authors. This is not science, nor a scientific process, but is hubristic (and destructive) politics, unbecoming of “world class” scientists.
In sharp contrast was Singer’s NIPCC Summary document written by 23 solid, identified scientists, a number of whom were quite available for discussion and questions at the meeting. This was quite a refreshing difference in candor and openness than what we’ve seen from the IPCC. Read more here.
By Alan Caruba, Canada Free Press
Like a mirage in the desert, climate change-the term that has replaced global warming-looks real, but disappears in shimmering rays when approached. Of course there’s climate change. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Its history is about climate change. Such changes occur over centuries.
What drives up the cost of electricity is the failure to use the centuries’ worth of abundant coal that exists in the United States, some of which is off limits thanks to former President Clinton declaring its location in Utah to be a national historical site. What drives up the cost of electricity is the refusal to allow liquid natural gas storage facilities to built in order to have access to this other source of power generation. Famously, the resistance to the building of nuclear generation facilities is also causing prices to rise. The utility’s advertisement does make one thing clear, stating that, “the cost of producing electricity has gone up dramatically.”
For that you can thank environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth and others who continue to do everything they can to thwart the building of new power facilities or access to the oil and gas reserves that exist in the U.S. This is not a problem about climate change. This is a supply and demand problem. This is about requiring utilities to spend billions to lower emissions that, in fact, have no impact whatever on climate. Worse, not only have utilities bought into the global warming/climate change myths, the media continues to repeat all the scientifically discredited claims. There’s the truth and there’s the billions that will be sucked out of the pockets of American consumers by utilities using the climate change mirage to hide the fact that ample natural gas and coal exists to produce electricity or that nuclear is clearly the way to go in the future. No matter what the advertisements and corporate statements say, climate change is something that occurs over centuries and is something over which no nation, nor all the nations of the world, has any control. History has taught us this over and over again. As for global warming, we are emerging out of a record-breaking and record-setting cold winter that hit, not only the northern hemisphere, but reached down into South America and South Africa. So, who do you believe? The utilities? The environmentalists? The government? Or the simple evidence of recent massive blizzards, rapidly growing glaciers, increased polar ice shelves, and snow where snow has not fallen in a very long time? Read full story here.
By Noel Sheppard, Newsbusters
Since 1942, the Ad Council has been creating important public service announcements that have ranged from Smokey Bear’s “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires,” The Crash Test Dummies, McGruff the Crime Dog, “A Mind is a Terrible Thing To Waste,” and “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.”
Sadly, this non-profit organization has not only decided to take on the most recent liberal bogeyman known as anthropogenic global warming, but do so by using young children. In the ad embedded to the right, a young girl is actually about to be hit by a train to disgracefully demonstrate that our inaction today will kill our children tomorrow. In another, kids imitate ticking clocks as they list the predicted climate change horrors of massive heat waves, severe droughts, and devastating hurricanes. I don’t know about you, but irrespective of my position on this issue, I find using children in this fashion to be indefensible and way over the line of decency. How ‘bout you? Read more and see the commercials in question here.
Pittsburgh Tribune Review Editorial
Big Media bloviation by The Washington Post and other gasbags about man-made global warming pretends that political science is science. The bias at most news outlets about climate alarmism—and the indifference about reporting anything that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy—can be seen in a Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), as Lorne Gunter of Canada’s National Post reminded recently.
The NIPCC is a counterbalance to the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which blames man for global warming. Washington Post readers learned the NIPCC has ties to conservative politicians and that the Heartland Institute, which sponsored the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change this month, received money from Big Oil and Big Health Care. The Washington Post got it half right. Not taking anything at face value is wise, especially regarding such a white-hot issue. But since it’s not settled science, both sides should face the same exposure.
Skeptics of the Al Gore orthodoxy blaming man must be looked at closely by the media—and should welcome that to help establish their credentials to a brainwashed public. But Mr. Gore/ true believers must be held to the same standard. Science and reason don’t generate the hot air produced by politicians and the U.N.