Wednesday, August 09, 2006

HOT OFF THE SHOW! Scientific Tug of War on Global Warming



Our friend, Marc Morano, former Sr. Staff writer for CNS News, now working with Senator James Inhofe on the Committee on Environment and Public Works, continues his credible work on environmental issues. In a press release entitled AP INCORRECTLY CLAIMS SCIENTISTS PRAISE GORE’S MOVIE March lists a small sampling of what scientists have said about the "An Inconvenient Truth" which we talked about on the show on our Tuesday LIVE! show, and will be the focus of discussion on today's show:

Here is just part of the PR:

Gore’s claim that global warming is causing the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro to disappear has also been debunked by scientific reports. For example, a 2004 study in the journal Nature makes clear that Kilimanjaro is experiencing less snowfall because there’s less moisture in the air due to deforestation around Kilimanjaro.

Here is a sampling of the views of some of the scientific critics of Gore:

Professor Bob Carter, of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia, on Gore’s film:

"Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

"The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many finepractitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that hispropaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science." – Bob Carter as quoted inthe Canadian Free Press, June 12, 2006

Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, wrote:

“A generalcharacteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that theearth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.” - Lindzen wrote in an op-ed in the June 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal

Gore’s film also cites a review of scientific literature by the journal Science which claimed 100% consensus on global warming, but Lindzen pointed out the study was flat out incorrect.

“…A study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.” -Lindzen wrote in an op-ed in the June 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal.

Roy Spencer, principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville, wrote an open letter to Gore criticizing his presentation of climate science in the film:

“…Temperature measurements in the arctic suggestthat it was just as warm there in the 1930's...before most greenhouse gasemissions. Don't you ever wonder whether sea ice concentrations back then werelow, too?”- Roy Spencer wrote in a May 25, 2006 column.

Former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball reacted to Gore’s claim that there has been a sharp drop-off in the thickness of the Arctic ice cap since 1970.

"The survey that Gore cites was a single transect acrossone part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology,” –Tim Ball said, according to the Canadian Free Press.


Hear the show (See 8/9/06)


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