Liberty on Tap since 1984
The con-senseless for global warming media coverage
Marc Morano's ClimateDepot and Anthony Watts' WUWT blog sites have drawn attention to another last-gasp effort by supporters of the man-caused global warming crisis to say the science is settled among climatologists, but it's that darn news media that's responsible for the idiot general public not understanding the crisis. The graphic showing these alleged "skewed" polling numbers is here at the oddly named SkepticalScience.com, which at least makes the effort to clarify its intentions with the subtitle, "getting skeptical about global warming skepticism".
I'll leave it to others to show what's wrong with the first part of the graphic about the scientific consensus. The supposed balance shown in the "Media Coverage" part of the graphic was especially intriguing to me, since my 7/29 American Thinker article "The Left and Its Talking Points" shows what I found in just one news outlet's amazingly unbalanced coverage of IPCC scientists vs anything remotely skeptical.
To make its claim about fair media coverage, the graphic has a reference to a "Boykoff 2008" paper, strangely not made into a clickable link at the PDF version, unlike the support references for the other parts of the graphic. Quick internet searching of the name and some words from the sentence preceding it reveals it is Max Boykoff's, "Lost in Translation? United States Television News Coverage of Anthropogenic Climate Change, 1995-2004" seen here. (**6/1/11 author edit: his page has been updated and the paper reference is gone, thus we now need to see the old reference at this internet archive page version, it's the 3rd publication on his list.**)
Not surprisingly, Boykoff's paper takes swipe at skeptic Pat Michaels about alleged corrupt funding, which supposedly led Michaels "to downplay human’s role in climate change and confuse public understanding of anthropogenic climate change" What's Boykoff’s source? A 2006 ABC news report which itself was citing of all people......................:
I suppose one of my future projects ought to be to create a huge connections chart illustrating how many degrees of separation Ross Gelbspan has to any given defense of the man-caused global warming concept.
(Pt II continues here)
I'll leave it to others to show what's wrong with the first part of the graphic about the scientific consensus. The supposed balance shown in the "Media Coverage" part of the graphic was especially intriguing to me, since my 7/29 American Thinker article "The Left and Its Talking Points" shows what I found in just one news outlet's amazingly unbalanced coverage of IPCC scientists vs anything remotely skeptical.
To make its claim about fair media coverage, the graphic has a reference to a "Boykoff 2008" paper, strangely not made into a clickable link at the PDF version, unlike the support references for the other parts of the graphic. Quick internet searching of the name and some words from the sentence preceding it reveals it is Max Boykoff's, "Lost in Translation? United States Television News Coverage of Anthropogenic Climate Change, 1995-2004" seen here. (**6/1/11 author edit: his page has been updated and the paper reference is gone, thus we now need to see the old reference at this internet archive page version, it's the 3rd publication on his list.**)
Not surprisingly, Boykoff's paper takes swipe at skeptic Pat Michaels about alleged corrupt funding, which supposedly led Michaels "to downplay human’s role in climate change and confuse public understanding of anthropogenic climate change" What's Boykoff’s source? A 2006 ABC news report which itself was citing of all people......................:
” ‘This coal industry disinformation campaign is a repeat of a similar campaign launched in the early 1990s by Western Fuels and other coal interests,’ said Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Ross Gelbspan.”
That would be the same Ross Gelbspan who is the central figure of my 7/6 American Thinker article "Smearing Global Warming Skeptics", who never won a Pulitzer and did not discover the so-called disinformation campaign he is so widely credited with.I suppose one of my future projects ought to be to create a huge connections chart illustrating how many degrees of separation Ross Gelbspan has to any given defense of the man-caused global warming concept.
(Pt II continues here)
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Comment by M.Bailey on August 4, 2010 at 1:24pm -
Well the whole issue raised in this graphic is peripheral. For the sake of argument let's say that the 97% of scientists are right and humans are causing global warming. Let's also agree that media coverage vastly under-reports this "fact." Let's ALSO agree that this has caused people to be painfully ignorant of anthropomorphic global warming. The simple question that these people never ask is: So what?
If you look at the now-infamous "hockey stick graph" and assume that it is a 100% accurate representation of the global temperature situation you come away with the following bit of knowledge: In the last 200 years global temperatures have increased by about 1-degree Centigrade. So here's where it gets sticky.
Let's say, again for the sake of argument, that this trend will continue unabated for the next 200 years, only it'll be worse! The result will be a global increase of 3-degrees Centigrade over temps in 1800. And let's also assume that this will result in rising sea-levels, melting glaciers, and the appearance of vast stretches of desert where there once was none.
This is really worst-case scenario kind of stuff, but let's assume it's all true. From a policy standpoint we are forced to ask the question "If we eliminated CO2 emissions COMPLETELY, would it make a difference?" I'm not talking about Cap-and-Trade, I'm not taking about low-emission vehicles, I'm talking about a global 100% reduction in CO2 emissions (aside from normal mammalian respiration of course). The answer to the question is nobody knows. Warming is caused by lots of things. CO2 is only one, and we don't know to what extent it contributes to global warming relative to methane, nitrogen-based compounds, and others.
So policy makers are faced with a simple reality. You can cripple the global economy in exchange for a reduction in CO2, and this will have some undetermined effect on global temperatures. This may or may not do anything, but it will certainly exacerbate global poverty on a massive scale.
From a policy standpoint this is a slam dunk. You can not choose to cripple a local or global economy in exchange for some undeterminable outcome.
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