Wash. Journal touts Nat. Review article skeptical of Global Warming....

[Gabi Hayes]

anybody see that this morning? the host kept reading and reading and reading from the latest National Review, which attacked the recent Time Magazine article on Global Warming, for which it won the Magazine of the Year Award recently

some toad named Jason Steorts wrote it, and the hostbot read globs of it, then took calls for 45 minutes: do you believe global warming is exaggerated, or something close to that

the calls in favor of exaggeration were a sad combination of ignorance, hubris, RW talking points, rants against liberal scientists (liberals in general), and plain imbecility.

I wonder if he read equal amounts of the Time article when it came out, cause he didn't read word one of that today.

here's the National Review teaser (you have to subscribe, ha, to read the whole thing). I'm including the entire tease, as I'm assuming all DUers are going to run right out and buy their fabulous product after reading this free advertising:

COVER STORY
Scare of the Century
The alarms and assertions about global warming have gone reprehensibly too far

JASON LEE STEORTS

But what, oh what, would the earth do without Time magazine?

“Suddenly and unexpectedly,” Time announced in a recent issue, “the crisis is upon us.” Haven’t noticed the crisis? You must not be looking very hard. “The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame.” Time accordingly devoted a special report to saving Mother Gaia. The report is half anti-Republican polemic, half catalogue of global warming’s supposed ills — and none receives greater emphasis than the melting of polar ice. We see a photograph of a polar bear, standing all by his lonesome at the water’s edge, and are told that the poor fellow might drown because “polar ice caps are melting faster than ever.” Later, we learn that “the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft.”

Science magazine has itself been prone to hysteria. The issue that Time mentions contains no fewer than eight studies and articles about the ice caps, and begins with a news story warning that “startling amounts of ice slipping into the sea have taken glaciologists by surprise; now they fear that this century’s greenhouse emissions could be committing the world to a catastrophic sea-level rise.” The policy implications of such reportage are clear, but in case you missed them, Time connects the dots: “Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try?”

The answer is, yes, it may indeed be moral not to try. What is not moral is to distort the truth for political ends — which is precisely what has been done with the ice-caps story. Here’s what you haven’t read.

The world has two major ice sheets, one covering most of Greenland and the other covering most of Antarctica. While melting sea ice has captured its share of attention, it’s the land sheets that matter. Sea ice is already in the water, so its melting doesn’t raise ocean levels. But if land ice melts, the sea gets higher. Time wants you to be very worried about this: “By some estimates, the entire Greenland ice sheet would be enough to raise global sea levels 23 ft., swallowing up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh. The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 215 ft.” Farewell, Dhaka, we shall miss thee.

Or not. Those numbers sound impressive, but the chances of the ice caps’ fully melting are about as high as the chances of Time’s giving you an honest story on global warming. The truth is that there’s no solid evidence supporting the conclusion that we’ve locked the ice caps in to a melting trend. Let’s look at Antarctica and Greenland in turn.

About Antarctica, University of Virginia climate scientist Patrick J. Michaels is direct: “What has happened is that Antarctica has been gaining ice.” He explains that there has been a cooling trend over most of Antarctica for decades. At the same time, one tiny portion of the continent — the Antarctic Peninsula — has been warming, and its ice has been melting. The peninsula constitutes only about 2 percent of Antarctica’s total area, but almost every study of melting Antarctic ice you’ve heard of focuses on it.

So what about the rest of the continent? In 2002, Nature published a study by Peter Doran that looked at Antarctic temperature trends from 1966 to 2000. What it found was that about two-thirds of Antarctica got colder over that period. At the same time, Antarctica has gotten snowier, and as the snow has accumulated the ice sheet has grown. Snowfall is probably rising because water temperatures around Antarctica have gotten slightly — repeat, slightly — warmer. As a result, there is more surface evaporation, making for higher humidity and more precipitation. Higher humidity also means more clouds, which might explain the cooler weather.

How much ice has Antarctica gained? In a 2005 study published in Science, Curt Davis used satellite measurements to calculate changes in the ice sheet’s elevation, and found that it gained 45 billion tons of ice per year between 1992 and 2003. Far from flooding the coasts, that’s enough to lower sea levels by roughly 0.12 millimeters annually.

http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=NjAxNzZjNTU4OGIyZWYxYTgwMzZhOTFiNmYwZTUyZmU=

here's the Time cover story.

http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1176980,00.html

can't wait to see what the upshot on this

as someone here, I think posted, not ONE peer reviewed article in an established scientific journal since 1993 has said that we're not undergoing serious 'global warming,' resulting in effects on the earth's climate

so I hope some answers to this Jason Steorts will be coming soon. and I can't wait to see what the editors of Science Magazine have to say.

anybody care to link some info they have that can respond to the part of the article I'm posting?

thx

[Gabi Hayes]

1. gee, what a surprise.....the first scientist cited by Steorts:

respected climatologist, or paid energy industry shill?

you be the judge:

Even as global warming intensifies, the evidence is being denied with a ferocious disinformation campaign. This campaign is waged on many fronts: in the media, where public opinion is formed; in the halls of Congress, where laws are made; and in international climate negotiations. In their most important accomplishment, global warming critics have successfully created the general perception that scientists are sharply divided over whether it is taking place at all.

Key to this success has been the effective use of a tiny band of scientists -- principally Drs. Patrick Michaels, Sherwood Idso, Robert Balling, and S. Fred Singer -- who have proven extraordinarily adept at draining the issue of all sense of crisis. Deep-pocketed industry public relations specialists have promoted their opinions through every channel of communication they can reach. They have demanded access to the press for these scientists' views, as a right of journalistic fairness. Unfortunately, most editors are too uninformed about climate science to resist. They would not accord to tobacco company scientists who dismiss the dangers of smoking the same weight that they accord to world-class lung specialists. But in the area of climate research, few major news stories fail to feature prominently one of these handful of industry-sponsored scientific "greenhouse skeptics."

If the public has been lulled into a state of disinterest, the effect on decision makers has been even more effective. Testimony by industry-sponsored skeptics contributed to the defeat of proposals to increase the cost of fossil-fuel generated power, to cut the climate research budget, and to discredit the scientific findings of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), which represents the consensus of 2,500 scientists.

The rise to prominence of most of these greenhouse skeptics is spelled out in several reports of the Western Fuels Association, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit consortium of coal utilities and suppliers. In its 1994 annual report, Western Fuels declared that "there has been a close to universal impulse in the trade association community here in Washington to concede the scientific premise of global warming... We have disagreed, and do disagree, with this strategy."

........

In May 1995 testimony under oath to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, Michaels revealed under oath that he had received more than $165,000 in industry and private funding over the previous five years. Not only did Western Fuels fund two journals that he edited -- his World Climate Review and its successor newsletter World Climate Report -- but it provided a $63,000 grant for his research. Another $49,000 came to Michaels from the German Coal Mining Association and $15,000 from the Edison Electric Institute. Michaels also listed a grant of $40,000 from the western mining company Cyprus Minerals, the largest single funder of the anti-environmental Wise Use movement.

http://www.organizenow.net/cco/right/globalwarm.html

[EST]

2. The r/w shilling was so sickeningly obvious, I turned 'm off.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. "Science magazine (sic) has itself been prone to hysteria"

For those keeping score at home, the journal Science is the world's most prestigious scientific journal.

[Gabi Hayes]

4. and Jason Steorts is a very recent Harvard grad, who wrote sneeringly

of anti war protestors.

little toad has quite the track record

hey! Jason! you hate the protestors so much. why are you still HERE? there's a lot of room in the National Guard these days; all those troops getting maimed by the IEDs and all. how's come you haven't joint up yet?

huh?

[Gabi Hayes]

5. Good Gore movie link, thanks to zidzi

thanks!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/21/AR2006052101183.html