Your recent article “2006: The Year of Climate Change” painted a false picture. Labeling as “outliers” anyone who doubts the media’s politically correct dogma that man-made global warming is going to destroy the planet, the article fails to answer the valid objections it cites from one of these supposedly notorious “outliers,” Dr. Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia. It simply makes a tawdry ad hominem argument that his research is partially funded by energy industry foundations, ignoring the fact that you could make the same argument of bias against the other side.
Failing to answer Dr. Michaels’ argument, your article contains no facts to support the global warming case other than saying a lot of politically zealous scientists and liberal politicians believe it. Of course, the same sort of buzz existed in the ’70s about population growth, at that time also falsely called a “scientific consensus.” Yet the “dissenters” turned out to be right.
What the article does offer is misleading links to other websites. One is a political press release by bureaucrats for the G8 which offers no hard science, only rhetoric. Two links are merely opinion surveys of non-scientists. Gee, why bother doing scientific research when we can vote on what truth is? The other is a survey of global warming research by a UCSD “history of science professor” which she later acknowledged was based on a serious flaw. In fact, less than 2 percent of the global studies she cited supported the view that there is a “global warming consensus” (see “Failed Defense“).
Within the past year, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a report done by top-tier university researchers with no outside funding. It shredded the methodology and conclusions of the U.N.’s 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment, the cornerstone study supporting the extremist global warming position. The NAS evaluation showed that the U.N. “study,” among other flaws, failed to consider earlier periods of natural global warming when, for example, Greenland actually became green (900-1300 A.D.), followed by a cool down in which the Thames River froze over.
There is no pro-warming consensus, and screaming loudly doesn’t make it so.