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A Really Inconvenient Truth

By Brad MacDonald

March 13, 2008

  

Al Gore says global warming is an inconvenient truth. “Inconvenient” adds a clever twist to the name of the would-be president’s popular documentary and book. But far worthier of scrutiny is the other word in the title: “Truth.”

Man-made global warming, says the former politician and a rising sea of climate alarmists, is not just inconvenient, it’s an unequivocal, undeniable truth. In fact, the truth about global warming is so convincing, that “debate in the scientific community is over.”

Says who? Well, the United Nations for starters. February of last year, the United Nations issued a press release highlighting its latest report, which apparently proved “changes in the atmosphere, the oceans and glaciers and ice caps now show unequivocally that the world is warming due to human activities” (emphasis mine throughout). According to Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (unep), Feb. 2, 2007, will be remembered as the day “where the question mark was removed behind the debate on whether climate change has anything to do with human activity on this planet.”

Then in December, at the circus-like Bali conference in Indonesia, an updated version of the report, produced by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc), was embraced by scientists and world leaders alike. Since then, the report—which is riddled with qualifying statements that corrode the report’s fundamental premise (that global warming is a man-made crisis)—has been touted by the mainstream press as conclusive proof of man-made climate change.

To climate activists, the case is closed on man-made global warming. But is it?

Flinging the word truth around is easy. Convicted criminals claim that the truth is they’re innocent; car salesmen say the truth is they can’t afford to drop the price further; a child with brownie mix smeared all over his face argues that he’s telling the truth when he denies running his tongue round the mixing bowl.

The real test of truth is whether or not it conforms with reality and is backed by verified, indisputable facts.

For climate alarmists, the really inconvenient truth is that a burgeoning number of scientists, climate experts and even politicians around the world are discussing facts that clash with the so-called truth that the globe is warming because of human activities.

The real truth is that the theory of man-made global warming—despite being virtually canonized in the UN and the minds of a slew of politicians and celebrities, and naturally in the mainstream media—remains one of the most contentious issues in science.

That contention was on full display in New York City last week.

Those who depend solely on the mainstream newsmedia to keep them informed might have missed the headlines about the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute and featuring nearly 100 speakers and 500 attendees skeptical of man-made global warming. The highly successful three-day conference occurred in the wake of recent reports of global cooling and the release of a blockbuster U.S. Senate minority report featuring over 400 prominent scientists disputing the theory of man-made global warming.

Last week’s conference testified to one towering truth in the world of science: Debate within the scientific community over global warming is far from dead and buried.

The high-water mark of the conference was the presentation of a report produced by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (nipcc) claiming nature, not human activity, was the cause of climate change. The nipcc is comprised of international scientists and was formed as a counterforce to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

International scientists, climate experts and policymakers at the event listened to lectures and panel discussions exposing the fraud of the global warming “truth,” perused studies and reports showing stark division in the scientific community over global warming, and swapped stories about how they’d been “denied tenure, shut out of scientific conferences and rejected by academic journals because no matter how scrupulous their research,” their conclusions contradicted the truth espoused by the climate change pharisees (National Post, March 10). Many attendees spoke of colleagues too afraid to attend the conference for fear of losing their jobs.

Many of the details at the conference can be found in this piece from the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Those who take the time to investigate the links therein will experience an eye-opening exposé of the staggering scale of the global warming scam. Take funding for global warming research, for example. Over the past decade, research intended to prove the veracity of man-made global warming has been funded to the tune of $50 billion, while global warming skeptic research has received a comparatively measly $19 million.

During the conference, the Business and Media Institute (bmi), a division of Media Research Center (America’s largest and most respected watchdog group), also released its comprehensive study on how the mainstream media reports on global warming. bmi’s analysis of 205 network stories between July 1, 2007, and Dec. 31, 2007, exposed the mainstream media as the largest propaganda vehicle for global warming crusaders:

Global warming proponents overwhelmingly outnumbered those with dissenting opinions. On average, for every skeptic there were nearly 13 proponents featured. abc did a slightly better job with a 7-to-1 ratio, while cbs’s ratio was abysmal at nearly 38-to-1.

Scientists made up only 15 percent of the global warming proponents shown. The remaining 85 percent included politicians, celebrities, other journalists and even ordinary men and women.

Of the three networks (abc, nbc and cbs), 80 percent of stories (167 out of 205) didn’t mention skepticism or anyone at all who dissented from global warming. cbs did the absolute worst job. Ninety-seven percent of its stories ignored other opinions.

The lesson: Transforming a lie into truth before an unwitting public is made easier by silencing dissenting opinions. Eighty percent of news stories omitted the opposing view altogether. How fair and objective is that?

Media bias isn’t confined to television networks. Read this March 4 article by Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post on last week’s climate conference in New York City. “Sponsored by the Heartland Institute,” she writes, “the 2½-day session poses a stark contrast to the near-unanimous chorus of concern expressed by top U.S. politicians and most of the scientific mainstream.”

“Stark contrast to the near-unanimous chorus of concern”?

Might the perceived “near-unanimous” concern about man-made global warming be a result of the gag-order imposed on thousands of scientists and hundreds of reporters from around the world espousing a dissenting opinion? Any person who watches cbs News or reads the Washington Post would be forgiven for joining the ranks of those who believe global warming is a man-made crisis. Why? Because unanimity is easy when dissenting voices are ignored.

Despite Al Gore and the UN’s claim that the case is closed on global warming, there are dissenting voices! Besides last week’s conference in New York, besides the 400 skeptical scientists that signed the U.S. Senate minority report released a few months ago, countless other studies show dissent in the scientific community over man’s role in global warming. One Canadian survey of 51,000 earth scientists and engineers by the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta (apegga), released last week, showed that 68 percent disagreed with the statement that “the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled.”

Near-unanimous?

Later in the Post piece, Eilperin compares the UN-sponsored ipcc report with the nipcc report, pointing out that some of the authors of the nipcc report “were not scientists.” The clear implication is that the nipcc report lacks scientific credibility, which is patently untrue.

But let’s address scientific credibility. According to the bmi study mentioned above, just 15 percent of global warming proponents shown on network television are scientists, while the remaining 85 percent are politicians, celebrities and ordinary men and women (whose viewpoints are often shaped by the mainstream press). Clearly, scientific credibility is not a primary concern of the global warming propaganda machine.

Eilperin concluded her piece with a series of quotes from climate alarmists taking potshots at the so-called quacks who attended the New York conference. Because the media and many politicians are now ignoring the climate skeptics, Princeton professor Michael Oppenheimer said, “They have to get together to talk to each other, because nobody else is talking to them.”

Oppenheimer’s remark makes for a tidy little soundbite. But in truth, that conference illustrated the rising tide of scientists proving themselves willing to come out and declare man-made global warming to be a giant fraud. The U.S. Senate Commmittee on Environment and Public Works reports:

In such nations as Germany, Brazil, the Netherlands, Russia, Argentina, New Zealand, Portugal and France, groups of scientists have recently spoken out to oppose and debunk man-made climate fears. …

In January 2008, environmental scientist professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder and director of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, announced publicly that he considered Co2-related climate fears to be “dangerous nonsense.”

In addition, at least one scientist publicly pondered reconsidering his view of man-made climate fears after the Senate report of 400 scientists was released in December. “It (the Senate 400 scientists report) got me thinking: I’m an environmental scientist, but I’ve never had time to review the ‘evidence’ for the anthropogenic causes of global warming,” wrote environmental scientist professor Rami Zurayk of the American University in Beirut on Dec. 27, 2007. “When I said, in my opening speech for the launch of unep’s (United Nations Environment Program) Global Environment Outlook-4 in Beirut: ‘There is now irrevocable evidence that climate change is taking place …’ I was reading from a statement prepared by unep. Faith-based science it may be, but who has time to review all the evidence? I’ll continue to act on the basis of anthropogenic climate change, but I really need to put some more time into this,” Zurayk wrote.

Professor Zurayk’s stark admission raises an interesting question: How many scientists on the man-is-the-cause-of-global-warming bandwagon are there simply because they have followed their colleagues, the UN, Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, or Bono? How many have proven, scientifically, that global warming has been induced by man?

The collective embrace of man-made global warming as the cause of the growing number of environmental and climate disasters is a globe-encompassing red herring, a giant distraction from the real cause of these natural catastrophes. Environmental and climate disasters are indeed becoming more common. But the primary and fundamental cause of these problems is not global warming.