Filed under: Movies, TV and Books , News , Polit-eco , Climate Change Canada’s National Post has long taken issue with the science of anthropogenic climate change, routinely running articles which glorify a variety of unresearched and improbable theories or argue the whole thing is a scheme by Big Green to raise our taxes and turn us all into socialists. While there are numerous examples (”Look to Mars for the truth on global warming!”), yesterday’s column by Lorne Gunter will serve as an excellent illustration of the combination of intellectual dishonesty and scientific inaccuracy that passes for climate change debate in the Post.
The piece opens with a criticism of Al Gore for apparently driving to a speech last week, and degenerates from there into a ideological screed against climate change, with a level of inaccuracy and misrepresentation surprising even for Gunter. A few examples:
Lorne: “Indeed, there is increasing debate in the scientific community whether there is even any warming occurring at all.”
Fact: Sure, just like there’s increasing debate over whether humans evolved from apes or were magicked into existence in the Garden of Eden 6000 years ago. Just because someone is willing to debate an idea doesn’t mean that their arguments have merit. Virtually all major scientific organizations in the world have now issued statements endorsing the theory of anthropogenic climate change; none, to my knowledge, have retracted them. Lorne: “Antarctic ice (which is about 20 times as voluminous as the Arctic kind) has grown by 1 loss per decade. Five (5) anticipate a repeat of the dramatic loss of 2007. Four (4) suggest a loss even greater than that experienced in 2007.”
Lorne: “And while global temperatures increased slightly in June, through the end of May, the nine-month decline in temperatures beginning in September was greater (0.8C) than all the warming of the 20th century (0.6C).”
Fact: Here it looks as though a warm month and cold month have been cherry-picked as start and end points for a data series in order to claim global cooling. However, according to the US National Climactic Data Center , the period from January - June 2008 was the 8th warmest since measurement began in 1880. 2007 was the 5th warmest year overall. That hardly suggests a cooling trend.
The problem with this kind of thing is not simply that it’s ignorant or dishonest, although it is. It’s that there are a surprising number of people who will weigh the opinion of one ill-informed reporter as being equal to that of thousands of scientists who have researched the topic for years, and will gauge their personal and political actions accordingly. And for those of us who propose to keep living on this planet, that’s not only sad but dangerous.   Read  |  Permalink  |  Email this  |  Linking Blogs  |  Comments

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Denial watch: National Post gets it wrong on climate change - again

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