The Times -- They Are A-Changin'
January 02, 2008: 08:05 PM EST
Jan. 3, 2008 (
Investor's Business Daily delivered by Newstex) -- Climate Change: Skepticism about man-induced global warming has reached the science pages of the newspaper of record. This suggests the debate not only isn't over, but that it's also finally newsworthy.
Some warming deniers must have slipped a body-snatching pod under the bed of New York Times columnist John Tierney. Or at the very least the accountants at Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM) must have put more than a lump of coal in the stocking hanging over Tierney's fossil fuel-burning fireplace.
In his first column of the new year, Tierney writes that the deniers of truth are in fact Nobel Laureate Al Gore and those who ignore both scientific evidence and the historical record in their prophecies of doom. 2008, says Tierney, will be no exception.
In a column titled "In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm," he exposes the Chicken Littles for what they are -- opportunists and alarmists who in this new year "will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming." Inconvenient truths and scientific fact will be ignored.
A case in point cited by Tierney was when Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites. It was hardly a blip in Earth's geological history, but Tierney noted how "it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming."
Less dramatic and newsworthy was the announcement that the same satellites also recorded that the Antarctic sea ice had reached the highest level ever. But then, polar bears allegedly drowning and icebergs breaking away are good theater.
We're told the Larsen B ice shelf on the western side of Antarctica is collapsing. It is warming and has been for decades. But it comprises just 2% of a continent that otherwise is cooling.
In the same week Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize, the respected scientific journal Nature published a paper you probably didn't hear much about. It concluded that global warming had a minimal effect on hurricanes.
In fact, after Katrina, hurricane watchers have had trouble getting as far as the letter "K".
"The last couple of years have humbled the seasonal hurricane forecasters," says Max Mayfield, a former director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. The 2007 season was the third calmest since 1966. In 2006 not a single hurricane made landfall in the U.S.
As for temperature, Tierney reports how British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would make 2007 the hottest year on record. After 2007 was actually lower than any year since 2001, the BBC still proclaimed: "2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend."
That must be why in January 2007 some $1.42 billion worth of California produce was lost to a disastrous five-day freeze. A few months earlier Gov. Schwarzenegger signed the California Global Warming Solutions (OOTC:GWSO) Act of 2006 designed to, uh, help cool the climate.
In 2007, Australia experienced its coolest June ever. The city of Townsville underwent its longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in a quarter-century.
But for greenies, it doesn't matter what the weather actually is or what the data actually show. It's all caused by global warming. As Canadian Greenpeace rep Steven Guilbeault explained in 2005: "Global warming can mean colder; it can mean drier; it can mean wetter; that's what we're dealing with." Oh.
We hope Tierney's piece signals the beginning of a fair and balanced debate on the Earth's climate and man's impact on it in the mainstream media, including all the inconvenient truths that are fit to print.
