Mover Mike

I didn't post anything at the time, just tossed it off as another bit of propaganda by Michael Milstein and Richard L. Hill of The Oregonian. But, this first paragraph in Sunday's front page story set my teeth on edge:

The debate over what to do about global warming remains divisive and politically charged. But few scientists dispute we live on a planet where average temperatures are higher than they were a century ago and will continue to climb. In the Pacific Northwest — a place defined by glacier-clad mountains, rivers and the sea — the effects are now seen and measurable.

Milstein earlier in the month interviewed Al Gore about his movie and there was this exchange:

Q: You recall in the film that when you started discussing global warming in Congress, you expected that everyone else would be as concerned as you were. But they weren't. Why do you think that is?

Al Gore: Yada, Yada, Yada

You know, I've been trying to tell this story for 30 years, and what's different in the last several years is the debate's over. There's no more debate. No more debate among serious people about five points. Number 1: Global warming is real. Number 2: We human beings are largely responsible for it. Number 3: The results are catastrophic. Number 4: We have to fix it, and we have to act quickly. And number 5: It's not too late. We still have time. (emphasis added)

Milstein doesn't challenge Gore on any of that false science. Then he and Hill follow with the Sunday piece on the front page!

Well, the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works just issued a report accusing AP of bias and guess what they said:

AP chose to ignore the scores of scientists who have harshly criticized the science presented in former Vice President Al Gore’s movie "An Inconvenient Truth".

[...]

The AP also chose to ignore Gore’s reliance on the now-discredited “hockey stick” by Dr. Michael Mann, which claims that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere remained relatively stable over 900 years, then spiked upward in the 20th century, and that the 1990’s were the warmest decade in at least 1000 years.

[...]

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.

I am sick and tired of newspapers and reporters treating this global warming propaganda as science and saying it is settled science. And, I am sick that our president, elected as a conservative, would cater to this hoax. Here's the Philippine News on June 28th saying

I don’t think many would dispute the impact global warming is having upon the world. Even Governor Schwarzenegger and President Bush have admitted its existence to some degree. I also understand the impact global warming is having but I have issues when it comes to some of the responses we have taken to lessen its impact because it goes against the theory of evolution.

This is propaganda, plain and simple. If you think James Frey's book should have been labeled "fiction", then Al Gore's movie should be called "An Inconvenient Fiction"!

Al Gore Global warming An Inconvenient Truth Mover Mike One more thing about that infamous "hockey stick" TCS has this to say:

In their attempt to not publicly scold Mann and his coauthors for questionable data analysis methods, the authors of the new report instead chose to restate the evidence for how warm the Earth has gotten recently. What the media didn't notice, however, is that the 1,000 year figure that was central to the whole hockey stick debate had now been replaced in the report by a figure of 400 years. Since most of the last 400 years was dominated by the "Little Ice Age," the warming during the 20th century should be welcomed by humanity.

The report says that surface temperature reconstructions before this period (about 1600) have "less confidence" and that "uncertainties...increase substantially backward in time..." for any of these proxy estimates of ancient temperatures. One review panel member told me that the statisticians on the panel were amazed when it was revealed that the method underlying the hockey stick had essentially no statistical skill when validated.

This is pretty harsh language for an NAS report written by review panel members, several of whom are equivalent to foxes guarding the hen house.(emphasis added)

And don't "uncertainties...increase substantially FORWARD in time...?"

Update:

Let me take a different tack with Global warming. Here's CO2 Science on Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming

There is little doubt the air's CO2 concentration has risen significantly since the inception of the Industrial Revolution; and there are few who do not attribute the CO2 increase to the increase in humanity's use of fossil fuels. There is also little doubt the earth has warmed slightly over the same period; but there is no compelling reason to believe that the rise in temperature was caused by the rise in CO2. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that future increases in the air's CO2 content will produce any global warming; for there are numerous problems with the popular hypothesis that links the two phenomena.

[...]

The observation that two things have risen together for a period of time says nothing about one trend being the cause of the other.

When I was a stockbroker, there was an amazing correlation between the direction of the stock market after the Super Bowl and the winner of the Super Bowl called the Super Bowl Effect.

According to the unconventional but surprisingly accurate indicator, stocks rise when a team from the National Football Conference or one from the pre-1970 National Football League wins the Super Bowl. It's worked for 26 of 29 Super Bowls.

However, just because there is correlation doesn't imply cause. CO2 Science goes to point out

In thus considering the seven greatest temperature transitions of the past half-million years - three glacial terminations and four glacial inceptions - we note that increases and decreases in atmospheric CO2 concentration not only did not precede the changes in air temperature, they followed them, and by hundreds to thousands of years! There were also long periods of time when atmospheric CO2 remained unchanged, while air temperature dropped, as well as times when the air's CO2 content dropped, while air temperature remained unchanged or actually rose. Hence, the climate history of the past half-million years provides absolutely no evidence to suggest that the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 concentration will lead to significant global warming.

Global warming CO2 Science Mover Mike

Update: Check out Maxedoutmama for a further discussion of the "crock" of global warming in Journalistic Scientific Malpractice