Collusion? Forget the oil industry. You have to wonder about the media and environmental scare-mongers. TIME magazine's recent cover story on global warming warned ominously: "Be Worried, Be Very Worried." This week CNN reported: Experts: Global warming behind 2005 hurricanes. And conveniently, this latest round of alarmism comes just in time for the release of Al Gore's global-warming shockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth".
Fortunately not all media are on the apocalyptic band wagon. More articles are appearing that critique "climate change" doomsaying and environmentalism. Here are a few:
From BBC News: A load of hot air? by Simon Cox and Richard Vadon.
Hardly a day goes by without a new dire warning about climate change. But some claims are more extreme than others, giving rise to fears that the problem is being oversold and damaging the issue.How much has the planet warmed up over the past century? Most people reckon between two and three degrees. They are not even close. The real figure, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is 0.6C.
It's not surprising most people get it wrong. We are bombarded by stories warning us that global warming is out of control. The most extreme warn us we will be living in a tropical Britain where malaria is rife and Norfolk has disappeared altogether.
Dr Hans Von Storch, a leading German climate scientist and fervent believer in global warming, is convinced the effect of climate change is being exaggerated.
"The alarmists think that climate change is something extremely dangerous, extremely bad and that overselling a little bit, if it serves a good purpose, is not that bad."
From The Calgary Sun: Let's put a freeze on global warming hype by Licia Corbella.
Exactly 31 years ago tomorrow Newsweek carried a story that predicted a rapidly cooling world that would result in a "drastic decline in food production -- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth."Hmmmm? It's the same doom and gloom scenario we hear today except turned on its ear -- now, however, it's not about devastation caused by cooling but rather by global warming. ...
"Recently, media and politicians have virtually stopped talking about global warming and are now referring to climate change instead," states [Dr. Chris] de Freitas [a world-renowned climatologist, geographer and environmentalist from the University of Auckland in New Zealand]. "That's because predictions of doom and gloom from warming just aren't coming true. But with 'climate change,' Kyoto advocates can now cite any change or phenomenon as proof that CO2 emissions have upset the global apple cart."
It's the old 'heads-I-win, tails-you-lose' trick played on a massive scale by "the global warming industry" who want to keep their hundreds of millions of research dollars flowing when their dire predictions of catastrophic warming are proven false, if not completely fraudulent.
From FoxNews: The Greenhouse Myth by Steven Milloy. (via Tom Pechinski)
Al Gore's global warming documentary hits theaters on May 28. Entitled, "An Inconvenient Truth," the film purports to make the case for concern over manmade emissions of greenhouse gases.Meanwhile at JunkScience.com, we’ve produced "The Real Inconvenient Truth" -- debunking two key myths of climate alarmism, including that the Earth's atmosphere acts like a greenhouse and that reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emission will avert significant temperature change.
And finally, I think this article underestimates the staying power of environmentalism as an ideology, but it's a good overview of its history. From The Harvard Crimson: Requiem for Environmentalism by Piotr C. Brzezinski. (via Paul Saunders on HB List)
The contemporary environmentalist movement faces a stark choice: change tactics or fade into irrelevance. Over the past decade, environmentalists have achieved few political victories and utterly failed to influence the general public. As indicated by a recent MIT study, the public knows little about environmental problems, and cares less. Out of 21 national and international issues, Americans ranked environmental problems 13th, well below terrorism, taxes, crime, and drugs.Alarmism -- the environmental movement's basic strategy—has led to this dead end. Since Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," the movement has been dominated by doomsday scenarios. Even on the first Earth Day in 1970, biologist George Wald predicted that "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken" while the New York Times warned that "man must stop pollution and conserve his resources…to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction." Fortunately, such apocalyptic forecasts have repeatedly proven to be wrong.
UPDATE I: From Chicago Sun-Times: Nothing to fear but the climate change alarmists by Mark Steyn. (via Harry Binswanger)
So what should we worry about? How about -- stop me if you've heard this one before -- "climate change"? That's the subject of Al Gore's new movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth.'' Like the trailer says: "If you love your planet -- if you love your children -- you have to see this movie." Even if you were planning to kill your children because you don't want them to live in a nuclear wasteland, see this movie. The mullahs won't get a chance to nuke us because, thanks to rising sea levels, Tehran will be under water. The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, says the Earth will "likely be an uninhabitable planet." The archbishop of Canterbury, in a desperate attempt to cut the Anglican Communion a slice of the Gaia-worship self-flagellation action, demands government "coercion" on everything from reduced speed limits to ending cheap air travel "if we want the global economy not to collapse and millions, billions of people to die."Environmentalism doesn't need the support of the church, it's a church in itself ...
UPDATE II -- April 28: Committees of Correspondence has a good repost of information about global warming and hurricanes.
Posted by Forkum at April 27, 2006 05:36 PM
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