NY Times: Gore's Global Warming Wrong
January 05, 2008 12:00 PM EST

Al Gore's global warming sermon is wrong, per New York Times columnist
John Tierney as highlighted by the Newsmax Staff.

by Grant Swank
NY Times: Gore's Global Warming Wrong
January 05, 2008 12:00 PM EST


Al Gore's global warming sermon is wrong, per New York Times columnist
John Tierney as highlighted by the Newsmax Staff.

Media gives public selective Gore-leaning reportage. Per Tierney, the
same media sidelines scientific data that directly contradicts Gore's
litany.

Many have questioned the Gore convictions; yet the intelligentsia has
regarded these free thinkers as offbeat, old-fashioned cultural lags.

Now none other than the New York Times starts 2008 debunking Gore and
his entourage. Tierney claims that news reports show bears scampering
for ice bricks while the facts relating to the larger picture are
purposefully ignored.

After all, will not the weeping public pant for bears to find a
homeplace? Surely. Then why tell the world population truth when the
media can squeeze out a tear or two or three?

"When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded
by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole
planet was warming.

"When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever
recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of
Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that
continent has focused on one small part that has warmed," Tierney
noted."

Newsmax reports: "Slow warming, Tierney explains, 'doesn't make for
memorable images on television or in people's minds, so activists,
journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and
starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an
'availability cascade,' a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of
economics and law at the University of Southern California.

"The 'availability cascade,' Tierney writes, 'is a self-perpetuating
process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people
become, leading to more news coverage and more fear.

"'Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the
press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and
supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and "The China Syndrome,"
minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became
newsworthy.'"

Tierney provides argument after argument supporting his thesis that
Gore's global warming put-up is nothing but incorrect. Supported by a
willing newsfeed, Gore's cadre has convinced the thinking public that
political correctness demands the knee-jerk posture.

To disagree with Gore's global warming bit in most social gatherings
today is to play the fool. No more after digesting Tierney's position
paper made daily newspaper read.

Newsmax continues: "Once such a cascade is under way, Tierney adds 'it
becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to
dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do.

"'Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming,
there's not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice
is melting -- or why the globe's other pole isn't melting, too.'"

The reading public now has filed away enough photo images as well as
Gore cliches to make it clear that global warming is gospel. To
counter is to recite heresy. The Tierneys of the printing world should
change all this if the same reading public is on its toes.

"While Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, Tierney
explains, 'they're also strongly influenced by regional weather
patterns and ocean currents.'

"He cites two studies by NASA and university scientists last year that
he reports 'concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea
ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but
those studies got relatively little attention -- and were certainly no
match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with
availability entrepreneurs.'"

Informed scientists who disagree with Gore are slighted by media and
politically correct politicians. As they remain irritated by such
shunning, they thankfully are still studied by the persistent
researchers. Now Tierney brings these shunted experts to the fore.

"Tierney writes that Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental
studies at the University of Colorado, 'recently noted the very
different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on
the link between hurricanes and global warming.

"He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one
in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.

"'Guess which paper jibed with the theory -- and image of Katrina --
presented by Al Gore 's "Inconvenient Truth"?'

"The answer: 'the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested
that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature
concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It
was published in December -- by coincidence, the same week that Mr.
Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.

"Tierney recalls that in his speech accepting the Peace Prize, Gore
'didn't dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate.' Nor, did
he mention how calm the hurricane season had been in his roundup of
the 2007 weather.

"Instead, Tierney notes, 'he alluded somewhat mysteriously to
"stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific," and focused on other
kinds of disasters, like "massive droughts" and "massive flooding."'

How convenient. How sensitive of Gore to note secretly his opposition
while purposefully sliding his enemy's position under the proverbial
rug.

How would the media-lynched public know the facts as to what Gore was
opportunistically doing?

"'In the last few months,' Mr. Gore said, 'it has been harder and
harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of
kilter.'

"'But he was being too modest,' Tierney says, adding, 'Thanks to
availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is
getting easier and easier.'"

A word to the wise is sufficient.

Read NY Times: "Global Warming Claims Bogus" at
www.newsmax.com/insidecover/NY_Times:_Global_Warming_/2008/01/01/60981.html?s=al&promo_code=422C-1

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/science/01tier.html