See Nothing, Hear Nothing, Report Nothing
Glacier? What glacier?“Avoid the term ‘global warming,'” advises New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “I prefer the term ‘global weirding,’ because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes.”
Friedman, who proves that anyone can be a climatologist, goes on to explain that with global warming, “The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous. The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.”
No matter what happens, blame global warming.
But as Friedman and other dogmatists peddle their propaganda, the case for man-made global warming is collapsing like a weak roof in a Beltway blizzard. In fact, we might call it “man made-up” climate change.
Phil Jones, the former director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and a central figure in the ClimateGate scandal, now admits that for the past 15 years, there has been no “statistically significant” warming. Furthermore, he says the warming trend that began in 1975 is not unlike two previous periods since 1850, and the Medieval Warm Period could have been a global phenomenon similar to the latter three. Yet Jones, who said he has had trouble “keeping track” of information supporting the infamous hockey stick graph, is still a believer in man-made global warming and he calls the last 15 years a blip in a long-term trend.
Meanwhile, John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a former lead author on the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is also questioning his faith. “The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” he said. Christy’s doubts, like those of other researchers, stem from problems with thousands of weather stations used to collect temperature data. Urbanization and changes in land use, equipment relocation and other factors have compromised the data. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming,” he said, “but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
These are truly stunning admissions, coming as they do from “the consensus,” and cast grave doubt on what we have long been told is “settled science.” For their part, U.S. media outlets have reported exhaustively on these developments… scratch that. No, they haven’t. As Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters notes, “Despite the seriousness of these revelations, much as what happened when the ClimateGate scandal first broke, with the exception of Fox News — and a lone report by CNN — America’s media have almost totally boycotted this amazing story.”
Similar revelations regarding data manipulation by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have surfaced with little or no fanfare.
Many of these same media outlets, however, found plenty of time to cover the “news” that Tiger Woods has broken his silence, or the fact that Hollywood director Kevin Smith was kicked off a plane for being too fat. As of Tuesday, CNN had reported it 14 times. Light on substance and, er, heavy on fragrance.
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