Tuesday, March 13, 2007

NYTimes Global Warming slap, not hit, piece

Yesterday on Drudge a teaser ran all day saying the NYTimes was doing a hit piece on Gore and his Global Warming alarm-ism. Well, the piece is in today's NYTimes and it's hardly what I would call a hit piece. It tempers each example, and person, who take issue with any salient aspect of Gore's movie, or the main concept of man's role, with the reappearing message that he largely got it right.

The piece does give mention, but not with the weight it deserves, to almost daily public pronouncements from scientists who cry foul. Consensus and the notion that there is no longer a debate are complete folly and will, I believe, irreparably damage the credibility of those who promote man's role in GW as indisputable fact and not a theory.

While the piece sites issues with the movies claims of increased deadly hurricanes and a catastrophic ocean level rise, the most damaging albeit underplayed point is made by nearly all who challenge man's role....and this point hasn't been countered in any substantial way to date. The evidence for a natural warming cycle that has repeated itself over the planets history is in abundance and most of it with no green house gases producing humans in existence.

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. “I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Dr. Easterbrook told the group. “And I’m not a Republican.”

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