Tom Harris

Media bamboozled into promoting another climate scare story

The new scientific paper “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years” attempted to show that twentieth century “global temperature” rise was unusual when seen in the context of the period since the end of the last glacial. But their research demonstrated no such thing. In fact, it was not even possible for the researchers to come to such a conclusion, based on the data they collected and the computational methods they employed.

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Climate scientists’ “consensus” based on a myth

Clearly, with so many serious issues raised by the respondents in the population being surveyed, if this part of the [Doran/Zimmerman global warming poll] was not to be corrected, and the survey re-administered, then it never should have been publicized at all, let alone trumpeted the way it was.

We must prepare for extreme weather events, not vainly try to stop them

Climate change should be an issue in the U.S. election, all right. But we shouldn’t be discussing greenhouse gases reduction in a futile attempt to stop climate from changing or extreme weather events from happening. Instead we should be discussing how best to prepare our growing societies for extreme weather like Tropical Storm Sandy, events that will continue to occur no matter what we do.

PBS Frontline climate change special cites bogus ‘consensus’

Besides the obvious bias we have come to expect from most main stream media coverage of climate change, “Climate of Doubt“, aired Tuesday night on PBS’s Frontline, committed one serious mistake that can not be left unaddressed.

Frontline repeatedly implied that there is an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that our CO2 emissions are driving us to a global climate catastrophe. They cited 97% as the fraction of the climate science community who agreed with climate alarmism.

That number is easily dismissed. It comes from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Strangely, the researchers chose to eliminate almost all the scientists from the survey and so ended up with only 77 people, 75 of whom, or 97%, thought humans contributed to climate change.

Besides the fact that, with tens of thousands of climate scientists in the world, 77 is a trivial sample size, the survey coordinators did not ask respondents how much humans had contributed to climate change. The poll is therefore meaningless.

Climate change activist pollsters at it again

New public opinion survey “intellectual baby talk”

On Thursday, October 18, 2012 a new report was released entitled “Climate Change in the American mind – Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in September 2012”. The report and the public opinion survey it discussed were produced by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. These are the same people who produced the bias-riddled October 9, 2012 Climate Change in the American Mind report about another of their recent polls, that one concerning U.S. public opinion about the connection between extreme weather and global warming. I wrote about the problems with that survey for PJMedia out of Los Angeles here.

As was the case with the October 9th survey, climate change campaigners and their allies in mainstream media quickly reported uncritically on the October 18th report:

Poll: Growing Majority Of Americans Understand The Earth Is Warming And Humans Are The Cause” proclaimed the alarmist site “Think Progress”.

Americans increasingly believe in global warming, Yale report says”, blared the Los Angeles Times.

“70% of Americans say global warming is real” exclaimed the Detroit Free Press.

But the new Yale/George Mason study is a seriously flawed report describing yet another biased and meaningless public opinion survey. Like practically all other polls on the subject, they failed to ask respondents the only questions that actually matter from a public policy perspective, questions like the following (which must be asked in this order):

“Stopping global warming” had no place in Presidential debate

Logic defeats the climate scare

Sometimes logic trumps even the loudest voices. That is what happened on Wednesday night when climate change and greenhouse gas emission reduction were completely missing from the first Presidential debate.

Nine climate activist groups—the League of Conservation Voters, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, The Climate Reality Project, MomsRising.org, GlobalSolutions.org, iMatter Campaign and Moms Clean Air Force—delivered petitions with over 160,000 signatures to the office of debate moderator PBS newsman Jim Lehrer urging him to ask the candidates about climate change. For weeks, main stream media have been pushing climate change, asserting that President Obama and Governor Romney must address this, “the most crucial issue of our time.”

But they did not, and Lehr completely ignored the topic as well.

It appears that Obama, Romney and Lehr all instinctively understood that, in comparison with the nation’s pressing issues, discussions about “stopping global warming” were not worth even a single minute of air time.