Don’t Look to the MSM for the Tough Questions
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 10:01 am by NealIn The Global-Warming Debate Isn’t Over Until It’s Over , John Stossel notes that when it comes to the tough questions about human-induced global warming, “The media rarely ask such questions.”
No kidding.
That’s because “the media” is an agenda-driven, politically-biased organization that is not interested in asking “tough questions” in order to ascertain the truth. This isn’t your Father’s media, and if the truth doesn’t mesh with the media’s template, then the truth be damned.
If you aren’t seeking out alternative sources of information (and since you’re reading this we suspect that you are), then you simply aren’t getting the whole story. Pass that advice along to your friends and colleagues who still think 60 Minutes or the New York Times are objective.
In “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore says that “sea levels worldwide would go up 20 feet.”
But the group that shared last week’s Nobel Prize, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says in a hundred years, the oceans might rise 7 to 24 inches.
Gore also talks about drowning polar bears. He doesn’t mention that the World Conservation Union and the U.S. Geological Survey say that today most populations of polar bears are stable or increasing.
And while man’s greenhouse gasses may increase warming, it’s not certain that man caused it. The most impressive demonstration in Gore’s movie is the big graph of carbon-dioxide levels, which suggests that carbon levels control temperature. But the movie doesn’t tell you that the carbon increases came after temperatures rose, hundreds of years later.
There’s much more. A British court ruled that U.K. teachers could show Gore’s documentary to students only if they also explain nine errors in the movie.
I wanted to ask Gore about that and other things, but he wouldn’t talk to me. Why should he? He says “the debate is over.”
“It’s absurd for people to say that sort of thing,” says Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute.
John Christy and Roy Spencer, who won NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Achievement for figuring out how to get temperature data from satellites, agree that Earth has warmed. “The thing that we dispute is, is it because of mankind?” Spencer says.
Some scientists say the warming may be caused by changes in the sun, or ocean currents, or changes in cloud cover, or other things we don’t understand. If it’s all man’s fault, why did the Arctic go through a warm period early last century? Why did Greenland’s temperatures rise 50 percent faster in the 1920s than they are rising now?
The media rarely ask such questions.