By Chris Horner, CEI on Planet Gore
Today’s unhinged exhibition occurs in the context of commemorating Hansen’s testimony 20 years ago, which kicked off the modern global-warming alarmist movement ten years into the warming spell - on the heels of 30 years of cooling - and ten years before that warming peaked. And Ed Craig is right to look to Hollywood for parallels, since the Left media has openly celebrated Hansen’s dog-and-pony show as well-managed “stagecraft” - a story I chronicle in my forthcoming book, “Red Hot Lies” (a volume that surely guarantees my own trial for enviro-war crimes).
Specifically, the PBS series Frontline aired a special in April 2007 that lifted the curtain on the sort of illusions that politicians and their abettors employed to kick off the campaign. Frontline interviewed key players in the June 1988 Senate hearing at which then-Senator Al Gore rolled out the official conversion from panic over “global cooling” to global warming alarmism. Frontline interviewed Gore’s colleague, then-Sen. Tim Wirth (now running Ted Turner’s UN Foundation). Comforted by the friendly nature of the PBS program, Wirth freely admitted the clever scheming that went into getting the dramatic shot of scientist James Hansen mopping his brow amid a sweaty press corps. An admiring Frontline termed this “Stagecraft.”
Sen. TIMOTHY WIRTH (D-CO), 1987-1993: We knew there was this scientist at NASA, you know, who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So we called him up and asked him if he would testify.
DEBORAH AMOS: On Capitol Hill, Sen. Timothy Wirth was one of the few politicians already concerned about global warming, and he was not above using a little stagecraft for Hansen’s testimony.
TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.
DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.[Shot of witnesses at hearing]
WIRTH: Dr. Hansen, if you’d start us off, we’d appreciate it. The wonderful Jim Hansen was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing, at the witness table, and giving this remarkable testimony.[nice shot of a sweaty Hansen]
JAMES HANSEN: [June 1988 Senate hearing] Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe, with a high degree of confidence, a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.
Read more here.
By Karl Bohnak, WLUC-TV6 Meteorologist
The U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), released a report late last week that received big coverage on all the network news outlets. In it, predictions were made that the weather over the United States will get hotter, wetter, more extreme and deadly over the next 50 years because of human-induced global warming. This report was released at the same time that serious flooding continued over portions of the Corn Belt. The timing appears to be no coincidence, since these NOAA scientists say that there will be more extreme rainfall events because of an increase in atmospheric water vapor caused by warming due to the burning of fossil fuels.
NOAA’s National Weather Service does and excellent job providing warnings and data to the public and private sector. However, these NOAA’s scientists have gone off-mission by implicitly tying the Midwest floods to human-induced global warming. The reaction to CCSP’s report has been strong and negative from scientists outside of the government. Climate scientist Roger Pielke, Sr. was critical of the report and its authors’ motivations: “Since this assessment is so clearly biased, it should be rejected as providing adequate climate information to policymakers. There also should be questions raised concerning having the same individuals preparing these reports in which they are using them to promote their own perspective on the climate, and deliberately excluding peer reviewed papers that disagree with their viewpoint and research papers. This is a serious conflict of interest.”
Meteorologist Joe Bastardi, medium-range forecast expert at the private firm Accuweather, called the report “nonsense.” He went on to comment, “I am not going to let garbage like this get out without challenging it. These guys are forecasting “what has already happened to happen again.” What Bastardi is referring to when he says “already happened,” are some of the extreme weather events of the 1930s to the 1950s. Meteorologists who believe natural cycles are more important climate drivers than the human contribution say we are in a pattern of long-term weather similar to the 1930s to 1950s. These scientists point to long-term ocean temperature cycles as the key driver of weather patterns over North America.
At one time scientists developed theories and then used experiments and observation in an impartial way to prove or disprove these theories. Now we have government-employed scientists who cherry-pick evidence and data to support their viewpoint. To me, the evidence is clear: the weather will continue to do what it wants to do and we humans need to adapt. We cannot change the weather or climate-all well-intentioned but silly proposals aside. It is also clear that science, more specifically climate science, has taken another credibility hit with this report. Read more of Karl’s post here.
Juliette Jowit, Guardian environment editor
The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer. The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The findings come just before the release of the government’s long-awaited renewable energy strategy, which aims to cut the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent over the next 12 years. The poll, by Ipsos MORI, found widespread contradictions, with some people saying politicians were not doing enough to tackle the problem, even though they were cynical about government attempts to impose regulations or raise taxes. In a sign of the enormous task ahead for those pushing for drastic cuts to carbon emissions, many people said they did not want to restrict their lifestyles and only a small minority believe they need to make ‘significant and radical’ changes such as driving and flying less. There is growing concern that an economic depression and rising fuel and food prices are denting public interest in environmental issues. Some environmentalists blame the public’s doubts on last year’s Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, and on recent books, including one by Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, that question the consensus on climate change.
However Professor Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, said politicians and campaigners were to blame for over-simplifying the problem by only publicising evidence to support the case. ‘Things that we do know - like humans do cause climate change - are being put in doubt,’ said Lomborg. ‘If you’re saying, “We’re not going to tell you the whole truth, but we’re going to ask you to pay up a lot of money,” people are going to be unsure.’ ‘It’s disappointing and the government will be really worried,’ said Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the government’s Sustainable Development Commission. ‘They [politicians] need the context in which they’re developing new policies to be a lot stronger and more positive. Otherwise the potential for backlash and unpopularity is considerable.’ Read more here.