Newsweek - "Iceberg Ahead" - Attacks Climate Change Scientists - Corporate Media at Work

TomCADem

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Sun Feb-21-10 08:01 PM
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Newsweek - "Iceberg Ahead" - Attacks Climate Change Scientists - Corporate Media at Work

The corporate media is hard at work spinning against progressive causes. The most obvious example is the media's ongoing attack on the Federal Government while giving Wall Street a free pass. Thus, attempts to regulate Wall Street are spun as a government take over, and regulation is blamed for the economic melt down.

In the area of climate change, the media has been in full attack blaming climate change scientists who have been under constant assault by the energy industry for doubts regarding the reality of climate change. This article in Newsweek is emblematic of these attack pieces that ignore the well paid efforts to discredit climate change:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/233887

Iceberg Ahead
Climate scientists who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet

One of the most impressive visuals in Al Gore's now famous slide show on global warming is a graph known as the "hockey stick." It shows temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rising slowly for most of the last thousand years and turning steeply upward in the last half of the 20th century. As evidence of the alarming rate of global warming, it tells a simple and compelling story. That's one reason the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included a similar graph in the summary of its 2001 report. But is it true?

The question occurred to Steven McIntyre when he opened his newspaper one morning in 2002 and there it was�the hockey stick. It was published with an article on the debate over whether Canada should ratify the Kyoto agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. McIntyre had little knowledge of the intricate science of climate change; he didn't even have a Ph.D. He did have a passion for numbers, however. He also had some experience in the minerals business, where, he says, people tend to use hockey-stick graphs when they are trying to pull one over on you. "Reality usually isn't so tidy."

As every climate scientist must know by now, McIntyre's skepticism of the hockey stick launched him on a midlife career change: he has become the granddaddy of the global warming "denial" movement. McIntyre asserted that the data of Michael Mann, head of Penn State's Earth System Science Center, did not support his conclusions, and that a true graph of temperatures would suggest a cyclical cause of recent warming. Following in his footsteps, a cottage industry of amateur climatologists have dug into the climate literature, tried to poke holes in the arguments, and demanded supporting data from scientists, sometimes under the auspices of Freedom of Information Act requests.

The scientists have resisted these efforts just as fiercely. For the past six years the conflict has played out in blogs, in the halls of Congress, and in deliberations of the IPCC. It came to a crescendo with the theft of private e-mails from the University of East Anglia in England in November, which raised questions about the scientific objectivity of several prominent researchers, including Phil Jones, who resigned in December as head of the Climatic Research Unit.

The battle between "alarmists" and "deniers" has taken a huge toll, not just on the reputations of Jones and the other "climategate" scientists. It has also damaged the credibility of climate science itself, and threatened more than a decade of diplomatic efforts to engineer a global reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. The effort, which has kept a forward momentum since the Kyoto meeting in 1997, came to a cold stop in Copenhagen in December. The conference was originally intended to bring the U.S. and China into a global agreement, but produced nothing of substance. Indeed, the climate project bears a striking resemblance to health-care reform in the United States�stalled by a combination of political resistance and hubris.