BCT Editorial – 5/9/08

This page was last updated on May 9, 2008.

Bias based; Editorial; Beaver County Times; May 9, 2008.

This editorial is a deliberate attempt at deception and uses the straw man tactic to do so.

To the best of my knowledge, no one disputes the fact that the Earth naturally goes through cooling and warming cycles and that we’ve recently gone through a warming cycle. The debate is purely over the cause of the warming. That is, was the cause purely natural, purely the result of man, or some combination of the two? The editorial author knows this.

Despite knowing all of this, the editorial author writes about “an alliance of crackpots, gadflies, media exploiters, political opportunists and conspiracy theorists, anti-global warming deniers.” Of course, this comment exposes the second tactic, belittling and demonizing those with differing positions in the hope we’ll ignore them. People with strong positions don’t evade debate; they encourage it.

A couple of days after winning an Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore referred to balanced reporting of the manmade global warming issue as “bias.” Mr. Gore said, “more than half of the mainstream media have rejected the scientific consensus implicitly — and I say ‘rejected,’ perhaps it’s the wrong word. They have failed to report that it is the consensus and instead have chosen … balance as bias.” Apparently the Times agrees with Mr. Gore.

The fact is, the debate over the cause of global warming is far from over in the scientific community. Almost on a daily basis we read about more scientists publishing papers indicating the warming was the result of natural causes. Indeed, recent data shows there has been no warming for at least 10 years.

A meteorologist (“crackpot?”) for the National Weather Service wrote, “Just remember that most of what is said or written is speculation based on certain assumptions and incomplete data. We need many more years of observation and research before we can even precisely define the problem.” A researcher (“conspiracy theorist?”) in the Atmospheric Research Section of the Argonne National Laboratory wrote, “Global warming, if it is indeed occurring, has been slight so far. I say ‘if it is indeed occurring’, because the ability to measure surface and upper atmospheric temperatures over the past hundred years or so and our understanding of how to average the temperatures from measurement stations over that period is still debated and being investigated. A slight warming trend appears to have occurred over the past 100 years, although most of that has occurred since World War II and especially since the early 1980s. Whether this has been caused by man or is part of a natural cycle (or perhaps both) remains to be shown.”

As a note to the editorial author, he/she needs to update his/her lingo. The “in crowd” has changed terminology from “global warming” to “climate change.” I think that’s because they got tired of all their global warming meetings occurring on unusually cold days. It also covers their butts should global warming change to global cooling, just as the fear of global cooling in the 1970s later changed to fear of global warming. Regardless of which way it goes, the Al Gores of the world need to blame it on humans, especially Americans, in order to justify taxes to fix the “problem.”

The editorial concludes with “As the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.” When can we expect the Times to follow its own advice?

For more of my position on this issue, please read my page entitled “Manmade Global Warming.”