I'm willing to bet that no one will read the entire speech by
Sen Inhofe in the Congressional Record from 2006
It sets the record straight and settles the arguments here but alas none of the climate alarmists will read it and learn how far off base they really
are.
ITS VERY LONG VERY DETAILED WITH NOTABLE QUOTATIONS
Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I rise to speak today about the most
media-hyped environmental issue of all time. It is the word that gets
everybody upset when you say it and the word or the phrase that many
politicians are afraid to say, and that is ``global warming.'' I have
spoken more about global warming than any other politician in
Washington today. My speech will be a bit different from the previous
seven floor speeches I have made on this subject, as I focus not only
on the science, as I have many times before, but on the media's
coverage of climate change.
Global warming--just the term--evokes many Members in this Chamber,
the media, Hollywood elites, and our pop culture to nod their heads and
fret about an impending climate disaster. As the Senator who has spent
more time educating about the actual facts about global warming, I will
address some of the recent media coverage of global warming and
Hollywood's involvement in this issue. And, of course, I will also
discuss former Vice President Al Gore's movie, ``An Inconvenient
Truth.''
Let's keep in mind, I do chair the committee in the Senate called
Environment and Public Works, the committee that has jurisdiction. I
recall so well when I first became chairman of this committee, almost 4
years ago, I was actually a believer that because I had heard it so
many times there must be something to this thing, until I started
looking at the science. But I have talked about that before.
Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and
global warming scares during four separate
[[Page 19155]]
and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930s, the
media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920s until the 1960s,
they warned of global warming. From the 1950s until the 1970s, they
warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming
the fourth estate's fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change
fears during the last 100 years--4 times during the last 100 years--and
every time just as hysterical as the time before.
Recently, advocates of alarmism have grown increasingly desperate to
try to convince the public that global warming is the greatest moral
issue of our generation. Just last week, the vice president of London's
Royal Society sent a chilling letter to the media encouraging them to
stifle the voices of scientists skeptical of climate alarmism.
During the past year, the American people have been served up an
unprecedented parade of environmental alarmism by the media and
entertainment industry, which links every possible weather event to
global warming. The year 2006 saw many major organs of the media
dismiss any pretense of balance and objectivity on climate change
coverage and instead crossed squarely on into global warming advocacy.
First, I will summarize some of the recent developments in the
controversy over whether humans have created a climate catastrophe. One
of the key aspects the United Nations, environmental groups, and the
media have promoted as the ``smoking gun'' of proof of catastrophic
global warming is the so-called hockey stick temperature graph by
climate scientist Michael Mann from Virginia and some of his liberal
colleagues.
This graph purported to show that temperatures in the northern
hemisphere remained relatively stable over 900 years, and then spiked
upward as we moved into the 20th century. And that spike would be the
``blade'' on the hockey stick. They say this was due to human activity.
Mann, who also copublishes a global warming propaganda blog--reportedly
set up with the help of an environmental group--had his hockey stick
come under severe scrutiny.
The hockey stick was completely and thoroughly broken once and for
all in 2006. Several years ago, two Canadian researchers tore apart the
statistical foundation for the hockey stick. In 2006, both the National
Academy of Sciences and an independent researcher further refuted the
foundation of the hockey stick.
The National Academy of Sciences report reaffirmed the existence of
the Medieval Warming Period. That was from about 900 AD to 1300 AD, and
the Little Ice Age from about 1500 to approximately 1850. Both of these
periods occurred long before the invention of the SUV or human
industrial activity and it could not have possibly impacted the Earth's
climate. In fact, scientists believe the Earth was warmer than today
during the Medieval Warming Period, when the Vikings grew crops in
Greenland. We all remember reading about that. That was a period of
time when the Vikings, all of a sudden, because it became warmer back
around 1000 AD, started inhabiting Greenland. They flourished up there,
until the Little Ice Age came along in 1500, and most of them died at
that time. Now the climate alarmists have attempted to erase the
inconvenient Medieval Warming Period from the Earth's climate history
for at least a decade.
David Demming, an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma's
College of Geosciences, can testify firsthand about this effort. Dr.
Demming was welcomed into the close-knit group of global warming
believers after he published a paper in 1995 that noted some warming in
the 20th century. He says he was subsequently contacted by a prominent
global warming alarmist and told point blank:
We have to get rid of the medieval warming period.
When the ``hockey stick'' first appeared in 1998, it did exactly
that. This guy, Michael Mann, turned around and ignored the fact that
we had this medieval warming period and then went into the little ice
age, which changed it.
The media has missed big pieces of the puzzle when it comes to the
Earth's temperatures and mankind's carbon dioxide, CO2,
emissions. It is very simplistic to feign horror and say the 1-degree
Fahrenheit temperature increase in the 20th century means we are all
doomed. First of all, the 1-degree Fahrenheit rise coincided with the
greatest advancement in living standards, life expectancy, food
production, and human health in the history of our planet. So it is
hard to argue that the global warming we experienced in the 20th
century was somehow negative or part of a catastrophic trend.
Here on the chart you can see during this period of time, when things
were flourishing and they went down, it was far more prosperous during
the medieval part.
Second, what the climate alarmists and their advocates in the media
have continued to ignore is the fact that the little ice age, which
resulted in harsh winters which froze New York Harbor and caused untold
deaths, ended about 1850. So trying to prove manmade global warming by
comparing the well-known fact that today's temperatures are warmer than
during the little ice age is like comparing summer to winter to show a
catastrophic temperature trend.
In addition, something that the media almost never addresses are the
holes in the theory that CO2 has been the driving force in
global warming.
The alarmists fail to adequately explain why temperatures began
warming at the end of the little ice age in about 1850, long before
manmade CO2 emissions could have impacted the climate. Then
in about 1940, just as manmade CO2 emissions rose sharply--
about 80 percent, with the largest increase in the middle of the
1940s--the temperatures began a decline, and that lasted until about
the 1970s, prompting the media and many scientists to fear a coming ice
age.
I am saying that this increase in CO2 emissions did not
precipitate a warming period; it precipitated a cooling period.
If CO2 is the driving force of the global climate change,
why do so many in the media ignore the many skeptical scientists who
cite these rather obvious inconvenient truths?
My skeptical views on manmade catastrophic global warming have only
strengthened as new science comes in. There have been recent findings
in peer-reviewed literature over the past few years showing that the
Antarctic is getting colder, and ice is growing. And a new study in
Geophysical Research Letters found that the Sun was responsible for 50
percent of the 20th century warming. Now, that is shocking: the Sun is
responsible for warmth.
Recently, many scientists, including a leading member of the Russian
Academy of Sciences, predicted long-term global cooling may be on the
horizon due to a projected decrease in the Sun's output. It is going to
start getting cooler again.
A letter that was sent to the Canadian Prime Minister on April 6 of
this year by 60 prominent scientists who question the basis for climate
alarmism, clearly explains the current state of the scientific
knowledge on global warming. Keep in mind, these 60 scientists were the
ones who recommended back in the 1990s that Canada sign onto the Kyoto
Treaty. They wrote this to Prime Minister Harper:
If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about
climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we
would have concluded that it was not necessary.
The letter also noted:
``Climate change is real'' is a meaningless phase used
repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate
catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of
these fears is justified. Global climate changes occur all
the time due to natural causes, and the human impact still
remains impossible to distinguish from the natural ``noise.''
These are scientists talking. People realize that these cycles go on.
God is still up there, and we have the cycles every 1,500 years or so.
Every time this happens, alarmists get this out and say we are all
going to die.
One of the ways alarmists have pounded the mantra of a ``consensus''
[[Page 19156]]
on global warming into our pop culture is through the use of computer
models that project future calamity. But the science is not there to
place so much faith in scary computer model scenarios which extrapolate
the current and projected buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
and conclude that the planet faces certain doom.
Dr. Vincent Gray, a research scientist and a 2001 reviewer with the
U.N. Intergovernmental Panel--they started like most bad things do,
with the U.N. Back in the 1990s they came out with the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Dr. Gray said:
The effects of aerosols, and their uncertainties, are such
as to nullify completely the reliability of any of the
climate models.
Earlier this year, the director of the International Arctic Research
Center in Fairbanks, AK, testified to Congress that highly publicized
climate models showing a disappearing Arctic were nothing more than
``science fiction.''
That is not Senator Inhofe talking. That is the director of the
International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks, who ought to know a
little bit about the Arctic.
In fact, after years of hearing about the computer-generated scary
scenarios about the future of our planet, I now believe that the
greatest climate threat we face may be coming from alarmist computer
models.
This threat is originating from the software installed on hard drives
of the publicity-seeking climate modelers. It is long past time for us
to separate climate change fact from hysteria.
One final point--and there are many. We have made seven talks,
averaging about an hour apiece, about the flawed science. One final
point about the science: I am approached by many in the media and
others who ask: What if you are wrong, Inhofe, to doubt the dire global
warming predictions? Will you be able to live with yourself for
opposing the Kyoto Protocol?
My answer is blunt. The history of the modern environmental movement
is chock full of predictions of doom that never came true. We have all
heard the dire predictions about the threat of overpopulation, resource
scarcity, mass starvation, and the projected death of our oceans. None
of them came true. Yet it never stopped the doomsayers from predicting
a dire environmental future.
The more the eco-doomsayers' predictions fail, the more the eco-
doomsayers predict. These failed predictions are just one reason I
respect the serious scientists out there today debunking the latest
scare mongering on climate change: scientists such as MIT's Richard
Lindzen; former Colorado State climatologist, Roger Pielke, Sr.; the
University of Alabama's Roy Spencer and John Christy; Virginia State
climatologist Patrick Michaels; Colorado State University's William
Gray; atmospheric physicist, S. Fred Singer; Willie Soon of the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Oregon State climatologist
George Taylor; astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, to name a few.
You never hear about these well-established scientists.
More important, it is the global warming alarmists who should ask the
question: What if they are correct about manmade catastrophic global
warming? They have come up with no meaningful solution to their
supposed climate crisis in the two decades they have been hyping this
issue.
If the alarmists truly believe that manmade greenhouse gas emissions
are dooming the planet, then they must face up to the fact that
symbolism does not solve a supposed climate crisis.
It is long past time for them to separate symbolism from fact. Let me
show you this. This is a chart I used on the floor before. A very
prominent Senator from the Northeast who bought into this hoax called
global warming--after he researched this chart, found it was true. This
chart says in the event that everything is true that they have said
about global warming, and if all of the countries--I am talking about
the developing nations, as well as the developed nations--adhere to or
achieve Kyoto goals, this is the difference it would make by 2050. It
is not even measurable.
A final point on the science of climate change. Again, I am
approached by many in the media and others who ask what if you are
wrong? I think the answer is that they have been wrong all along.
The alarmists freely concede that the Kyoto Protocol, even if fully
ratified and complied with, would not have any meaningful impact on
global temperatures. Keep in mind that Kyoto is not even close to being
complied with by many of the ratifying nations. Fifteen European
nations ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and 13 have not made their goals.
So they are not going to be able to do it.
Many of the nations that ratified Kyoto are now realizing what I have
been saying all along: The Kyoto Protocol is a lot of economic pain for
no climate gain.
Legislation that has been proposed in this Chamber would have even
less of a temperature effect than Kyoto's undetectable impact. And more
recently, global warming alarmists and the media have been praising
California for taking action to limit CO2. But here again
this costly, feel-good, California measure, which is actually far less
severe than Kyoto, will have no impact on the climate, only the
economy.
Symbolism does not solve a climate crisis.
In addition, we now have many environmentalists and Hollywood
celebrities, such as Laurie David, who have been advocating measures
like changing standard light bulbs in your home to fluorescents to help
avert global warming. Changing to more energy-efficient light bulbs is
fine, but to somehow imply that we can avert a climate disaster by
these actions is absurd.
Once again, symbolism does not solve a climate crisis. But this
symbolism may be hiding a dark side. While greenhouse gas limiting
proposals may cost the industrialized West trillions of dollars, it is
the effect on the developing world's poor that is being lost in this
debate.
The Kyoto Protocol's post-2012 agenda, which mandates that the
developing world be subjected to restrictions on greenhouse gases,
could have the potential to severely restrict development in regions
such as Africa, Asia, and South America, where some of the Earth's most
energy-deprived people currently reside.
Expanding basic necessities like running water and electricity in the
developing world are seen by many in the Green Movement as a threat to
the planet's health that must be avoided.
Energy poverty equals a life of back-breaking poverty and premature
death.
If we allow scientifically unfounded fears of global warming to
influence policymakers to restrict future energy production and the
creation of basic infrastructure in the developing world, billions of
people will continue to suffer.
Last week, my committee heard testimony from Danish statistician
Bjorn Lomborg, who was once a committed leftwing environmentalist until
he realized that so much of what that the movement preached was based
on bad science. Lomborg wrote a book called ``The Skeptical
Environmentalist'' and has organized some of the world's top Nobel
laureates to form the 2004 ``Copenhagen Consensus,'' which ranked the
world's most pressing problems.
Guess what. They place global warming at the bottom of the list in
terms of our planet's priorities. The ``Copenhagen Consensus'' found
that the most important priorities for our planet include combating
disease, stopping malaria, securing clean water, and building
infrastructure to help lift the developing nations out of poverty.
I have made a lot of trips to Africa. A lot of people know I have had
a mission there for well over 10 years now. Once you see the
devastating poverty--we think we have poverty in this country. Well, if
you saw their poverty and the kids running through the junk piles and
rats biting at the heels of their bloody feet, you would realize that
these fears about global warming are severely misguided.
I firmly believe that when the history of our era is written, future
generations will look back with puzzlement and wonder why we spent so
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much time and effort on global warming fears and pointless solutions,
such as the Kyoto protocol.
One of your favorite Frenchmen, Mr. President, Jacques Chirac, the
French President, provided the key clue as to why so many in the
international community still revere the Kyoto Protocol, when in 2000
he said Kyoto represents not climate change but represents ``the first
component of an authentic global governance.''
Furthermore, if your goal is to limit CO2 emissions, the
only effective way to go about it is the use of cleaner, more effective
technologies that will meet the energy demands of this century and
beyond.
The Bush administration and my Environment and Public Works
Committee--the committee I chair--have been engaged in these efforts as
we work to expand nuclear power and promote the Asian-Pacific
Partnership. This partnership stresses the sharing of new technology
among member nations, including three of the world's top 10 emitters--
China, India, and Korea--all of whom are exempt from Kyoto.
Keep in mind, even if all these charts were true and everyone is
going to comply with this, we passed in this Chamber just a very short
while ago, by a unanimous vote, 96 to 0, legislation that said if you
come back with any kind of treaty where we are going to treat
developing nations differently from developed nations, we are going to
oppose it. So it is unanimously opposed.
Many in the media, as I noted earlier, have taken it upon themselves
to drop all pretense of balance on global warming and have instead
become committed advocates for the issue.
Here is a quote from Newsweek. You have to listen to this, Mr.
President. This is very important. I am going to quiz you later. This
is a quote from Newsweek magazine:
There are numerous signs that the Earth's weather patterns
have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may
portend a drastic decline in food production--with serious
political implications for just about every nation on Earth.
A headline in the New York Times reads:
Climate Changes Endanger World's Food Output.
Here is another quote from Time magazine:
As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather
pattern of the past several years, a growing number of
scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly
contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part
of a global climate upheaval.
All this sounds very ominous. That is until one realizes that the
three quotes I just read are from articles in 1975 editions of Newsweek
magazine and the New York Times, and Time magazine in 1974. They were
not referring to global warming; they were warning of a coming ice age.
The same people who were hysterical back then are using the same words
to describe what is happening today.
Let me repeat: All three of those quotes were published in the 1970s
warning of a coming ice age. An ice age is coming; we are all going to
die.
In addition to global cooling fears, Time magazine has also reported
on global warming. Here is an example:
[Those] who claim that winters were harder when they were
boys are quite right . . . weathermen have no doubt that the
world at least for the time being is growing warmer.
Before one thinks that this is just another example of the media
promoting former Vice President Gore's movie, one needs to know that
the quote I just read is from Time magazine and not a recent quote. It
is from January 22, 1939. Yes, in 1939--9 years before former Vice
President Gore was born and over three decades before Time magazine
began hyping a coming ice age, and almost five decades before they
returned to hyping global warming.
Time magazine, in 1951, pointed to receding permafrost in Russia as
proof that the planet was warming.
In 1952, the New York Times noted that the ``trump card'' of global
warming ``has been the melting glaciers.''
But the media could not decide between warming or cooling scares.
There are many more examples of the media and scientists flip-flopping
between warming and cooling scares. They don't really care. They just
want to scare you. They want to make sure you are scared, and then they
are satisfied.
Here is a quote from the New York Times on fears of an approaching
ice age:
Geologists Think the World May be Frozen Up Again.
That sentence appeared over 100 years ago in the February 24, 1895,
edition of the New York Times. Let me repeat, 1895, not 1995.
A front-page article in the October 7, 1912, New York Times, just a
few months after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, declared that
a prominent professor ``Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age.''
The very same day in 1912, the Los Angeles Times ran an article
warning that the ``human race will have to fight for its existence
against the cold.''
An August 10, 1923, Washington Post article declared:
Ice Age Coming Here.
By the 1930s, the media took a break from reporting on the coming ice
age and instead switched gears to promoting global warming. This is the
1930s:
America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line
Records a 25-year Rise.
That was in an article in the New York Times on March 27, 1933.
The media of yesteryear was also not above injecting large amounts of
fear and alarmism into their climate articles.
An August 9, 1923, front-page article in the Chicago Tribune
declared:
Scientist Says Arctic Ice Will Wipe Out Canada.
The article quoted a Yale University professor who predicted that
large parts of Europe and Asia would be ``wiped out'' and Switzerland
would be ``entirely obliterated.''
A December 29, 1974, New York Times article on global cooling
reported that climatologists believed ``the facts of the present
climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign
near certainty to major crop failure in a decade.''
The article also warned that unless Government officials reacted to
the coming catastrophe ``mass deaths by starvation and probably in
anarchy and violence'' would result. In 1975, the New York Times
reported that ``a major cooling [was] widely considered to be
inevitable.''
These past predictions of doom have a familiar ring, don't they? They
sound strikingly similar to our modern media promotion of the former
Vice President's brand of climate alarmism, an alarmism he believes
will put him back in the White House.
After more than a century of alternating between global cooling and
warming, one would think that this media history would serve a
cautionary tale for today's voices in the media and scientific
community who are promoting yet another round of eco-doom.
Much of the 100-year media history on climate change that I have
documented today can be found in a publication entitled ``Fire and
Ice'' from the Business and Media Institute.
Which raises the question: How has this embarrassing 100-year
documented legacy of coverage on what turned out to be trendy climate
science theories made the media more skeptical of today's sensational
promoters of global warming? You be the judge.
On February 19 of this year, CBS News's ``60 Minutes'' produced a
segment on the North Pole. The segment was a completely one-sided
report alleging rapid and unprecedented melting at the polar cap. It
even featured correspondent Scott Pelley claiming that the ice in
Greenland was melting so fast that he barely got off an iceberg before
it collapsed into the water.
Mr. President, ``60 Minutes'' failed to inform its viewers that a
2005 study by a scientist named Ola Johannessen and his colleagues
showed that the interior of Greenland is gaining ice mass and that,
according to scientists, the Arctic was warmer in the 1930s than it is
today. If you see this film, they will say it is the warmest it has
ever been. It is just not true.
By the way, around the edges of ice caps there is a phenomenon known
as
[[Page 19158]]
calving. So when it becomes thicker in the middle, it melts a little on
the outside, but the overall volume density increases.
On March 19 of this year, ``60 Minutes'' profiled NASA scientists and
alarmist James Hansen who was once again making allegations of being
censored by the Bush administration. In this segment, objectivity and
balance were again tossed aside in favor of a one-sided glowing profile
of Hansen.
The ``60 Minutes'' segment made no mention of Hansen's partisan ties
to former Democratic Vice President Al Gore or Hansen's receiving of a
grant of a quarter of a million dollars from the leftwing Heinz
Foundation run by Teresa Heinz Kerry. I guess she is Teresa Heinz now.
There was also no mention of Hansen's subsequent endorsement of her
husband John Kerry for the presidency in 2004. He is a political
activist. This was never mentioned in the ``60 Minutes'' segment.
Many in the media dwell on any industry support given to so-called
climate skeptics, but the same media completely failed to note Hansen's
huge grant from the leftwing Heinz Foundation.
The foundation's money originated from the Heinz family ketchup
fortune. So it appears that the media makes a distinction between oil
money and ketchup money.
Mr. President, ``60 Minutes'' also did not inform viewers that Hansen
appeared to concede in a 2003 issue of ``Natural Science'' that the use
of ``extreme scenarios'' to dramatize climate change ``may have been
appropriate one time'' to drive the public's attention on the issue. In
other words, it is all right to lie in order to drive the public's
attention to an issue that you want them to have and to that opinion.
Why would ``60 Minutes'' ignore the basic tenets of journalism that
call for objectivity and balance in sourcing and do such one-sided
segments?
The answer was provided by correspondent Scott Pelley. Pelley told
the CBS News Web site that he justified excluding scientists skeptical
of global warming alarmism from his segments because he considers
skeptics to be the equivalent of ``Holocaust deniers.''
This year also saw a New York Times reporter write a children's book
entitled ``The North Pole Was Here.'' The author of the book, New York
Times reporter Andrew Revkin, wrote that it may someday be ``easier to
sail to than stand on'' the North Pole in summer. So here we have a
very prominent environmental reporter for the New York Times who is
promoting the aspect of global warming alarmism in a book aimed at our
kids.
In April of this year, Time magazine devoted an issue to global
warming alarmism entitled ``Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.'' This is the
same Time magazine which first warned of a coming ice age in the 1920s
before it switched to warning about global warming in the 1930s, before
it switched again to promoting the 1970s coming ice age scare. The
April 3, 2006, global warming special report of Time magazine was a
prime example of the media's shortcomings, as the magazine cited
partisan leftwing environmental groups with a vested financial interest
in hyping alarmism.
Headlines blared: ``More and More Land is Being Devastated by
Drought.''
``Earth is at the Tipping Point.''
``The Climate is Crashing.''
Time magazine did not make the slightest attempt to balance its
reporting with any views of scientists skeptical of this alleged
climate disaster.
I don't have journalism training, but I daresay calling a bunch of
environmental groups with an obvious fundraising agenda and asking them
to make wild speculations on how bad global warming might become is
nothing more than advocacy for leftwing causes. It is a violation of
basic journalistic standards.
To his credit, New York Times reporter Revkin saw fit to criticize
Time magazine for its embarrassing coverage of climate science.
So in the end, Time's cover story title of ``Be Worried, Be Very
Worried'' appears to have been apt. The American people should be
worried--they should be very worried--of such shoddy journalism.
As to Al Gore's inconvenient truth, in May, our Nation was exposed to
perhaps one of the slickest science propaganda films of all time.
Former Vice President Gore's ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' in addition to
having the backing of Paramount Pictures to market this film, had the
full backing of the media, and leading the cheerleading charge was none
other than the Associated Press, and of course they had the elitists,
from Hollywood.
On June 27, the Associated Press ran an article by Seth Borenstein
that boldly declared:
``Scientists give two thumbs up to Gore's movie.''
The article quoted only five scientists--two thumbs up, five
scientists. They were praising Gore's science, despite the Associated
Press having contacted over 100 scientists.
The fact that over 80 percent of the scientists contacted by the AP
had not even seen the movie or that many scientists have harshly
criticized the science presented by Gore did not dissuade the news
outlet one bit from its mission to promote Gore's brand of climate
alarmism.
Let's keep in mind, they said it is thumbs up, 100 percent of the
scientists, and it was only 5 out of the 100.
I am almost at a loss as to how to begin to address the series of
errors, misleading science, and unfounded speculation that appear in
the former Vice President's film and in his book of the same name.
Here is what Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist from MIT, has written
about ``An Inconvenient Truth.'' He is talking about Al Gore and his
movie. This is a scientist, Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist from MIT:
A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to
ignore the fact that the Earth and its climate are dynamic;
they are always changing even without any external forcing.
To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do
so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.
That is exactly what Al Gore is doing.
What follows is a brief summary of the science the former Vice
President promotes in either a wrong or misleading way:
He promoted the now debunked ``hockey stick'' temperature chart in an
attempt to prove man's overwhelming impact on the climate.
He attempted to minimize the significance of the medieval warm period
and the little ice age.
He insists on a link between increased hurricane activity and global
warming that most scientists believe does not exist.
He asserted that today's Arctic is experiencing unprecedented warmth
while ignoring that temperatures in the 1930s were as warm or warmer
than they are today.
He claimed the Antarctic is warming and losing ice but failed to note
that is only true of a small region and the vast bulk has been cooling
and gaining ice. This is the Antarctic.
He hyped unfounded fears that Greenland's ice is in danger of
disappearing.
He erroneously claimed that the icecap on Mount Kilimanjaro is
disappearing because of global warming, even while the region cools and
researchers blame ice loss on local land-use practices. What they are
talking about here is they had deforested the area down below. That was
the reason. It had nothing to do with CO2, obviously.
He made assertions of massive future sea level rise that is way
outside of any supposed scientific consensus and is not supported in
even the most alarmist literature.
He incorrectly implied that a Peruvian glacier's retreat is due to
global warming, while ignoring the fact that the region has been
cooling since the 1930s and other glaciers in South America are
advancing.
He blamed global warming for water loss in Africa's Lake Chad despite
NASA scientists concluding that local population and grazing factors
are the more likely culprits.
He inaccurately claimed polar bears are drowning in significant
numbers due to melting ice when in fact they are thriving.
[[Page 19159]]
He completely failed to inform viewers that the 48 scientists who
accused President Bush of distorting science were part of a political
advocacy group set up to support the Democratic Presidential candidate
John Kerry in 2004.
That was just a brief sampling of some of the errors presented in
``An Inconvenient Truth.'' Imagine how long the list would have been if
I had actually seen the movie. There wouldn't be enough time to deliver
the speech today.
So along comes Tom Brokaw. Following the promotion of ``An
Inconvenient Truth,'' the press did not miss a beat in their role as
advocates for global warming fears.
ABC News put forth its best effort to secure its standing as an
advocate for climate alarmism when the network put out a call for
people to submit their anecdotal global warming horror stories in June
for use in a future news segment.
In July, the Discovery Channel presented a documentary on global
warming narrated by former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw. The program presented
only those views of scientists promoting the idea that humans are
destroying the Earth's climate. You don't have to take my word for the
program's overwhelming bias. A Bloomberg TV news review noted: ``You'll
find more dissent at a North Korean political rally than in this
program'' because of its lack of scientific objectivity.
Brokaw also presented climate alarmist James Hansen to viewers as
unbiased, failing to note his quarter-million-dollar grant from the
partisan Heinz Foundation or his endorsement of Democratic Presidential
nominee John Kerry in 2004 and his role promoting former Vice President
Gore's Hollywood movie. Brokaw, however, did find time to impugn the
motives of scientists skeptical of climate alarmism when he featured
paid environmental partisan Michael Oppenhimer, of the group
Environmental Defense, accusing skeptics of being bought out by fossil
fuel interests.
The fact remains that political campaign funding by environmental
groups to promote climate and environmental alarmism dwarfs spending by
the fossil fuel industry by 3 to 1. Environmental special interests,
through their 527s, spent over $19 million compared to $7 million spent
by the oil and gas industry through political action committees in the
2004 election cycle.
I am reminded of a question the media often asks me about how much I
have received in campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry.
My unapologetic answer is always: Not enough, especially when you
consider the millions partisan environmental groups pour into political
campaigns.
Continuing with our media analysis: On July 24, 2006, the Los Angeles
Times featured an op-ed by Naomi Oreskes, a social scientist at the
University of California, San Diego, and the author of a 2004 Science
magazine study. Oreskes insisted that a review of 928 scientific papers
showed there was 100 percent consensus that global warming was not
caused by natural climate variations. This study was also featured in
former Vice President Al Gore's ``An Inconvenient Truth.''
However, the analysis in Science magazine excluded nearly 11,000
studies or more than 90 percent of the papers dealing with global
warming, according to a critique by British social scientist Benny
Peiser. Peiser also pointed out that less than 2 percent of the climate
studies in the survey actually endorsed the so-called ``consensus
view'' that human activity is driving global warming and some of the
studies actually opposed that view. Oreskes called 2 percent, 100
percent. But despite this manufactured ``consensus,'' the media
continued to ignore any attempt to question the orthodoxy of climate
alarmism.
As the dog days of August rolled in, the American people were once
again hit with more hot hype regarding global warming, this time from
the New York Times op-ed pages. A columnist penned an August 3 column
filled with so many inaccuracies it is a wonder the editor of the Times
saw fit to publish it. For instance, Bob Herbert's column made dubious
claims about polar bears, the snows of Kilimanjaro, and he attempted to
link this past summer's heat wave in the United States to global
warming--something even the alarmist James Hansen does not support.
Finally, a September 15, 2006, Reuters News article claimed that
polar bears in the Arctic are threatened with extinction by global
warming. The article by correspondent Alister Doyle quoted a visitor to
the Arctic--now listen to this, Mr. President--a visitor to the Arctic
who claimed he saw two distressed polar bears. According to the Reuters
article, the man noted that one of the polar bears looked to be dead
and the other one looked to be exhausted. The article did not state the
bears were actually dead or exhausted, they merely looked that way.
Have we really arrived at the point where major news outlets in the
United States are reduced to analyzing whether polar bears in the
Arctic appear restful? How reporting such as this gets approved for
publication by the editors at Reuters, I don't know. What happened to
covering the hard science in this issue?
What was missing from the Reuters News article was the fact that
according to biologists who study animals, polar bears are doing quite
well. Biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the Arctic government of
Nunavut, which is a territory of Canada, refuted these claims in May
when he noted that--this is a quote. Keep in mind I am quoting the
biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the Arctic government. He said:
Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are
stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct,
or even appear to be affected at present.
Sadly, it appears that reporting anecdotes and hearsay is now fast
replacing the tenets of journalism for many media outlets.
It is an inconvenient truth that so far 2006 has been a year in which
most major segments of the media have given up on any quest for
journalistic balance, fairness, and objectivity when it comes to
climate change. The global warming alarmists and their friends in the
media have attempted to smear scientists who dare to question the
premise of manmade catastrophic global warming, and as a result some
scientists have seen their reputations and their research funding dry
up.
The media has so relentlessly promoted global warming fears that a
British group called the Institute For Public Policy Research--and this
from a left-leaning group--issued a report in 2006 accusing media
outlets of engaging in what they termed ``climate porn'' in order to
attract the public's attention. Bob Carter, a paleoclimate geologist
from James Cook University in Australia, has described how the media
promotes this kind of fear:
Each such alarmist article is larded with words such as
``if,'' ``might,'' ``could,'' ``probably,'' ``perhaps,''
``expected,'' ``projected,'' or ``modeled,'' and many involve
such deep dreaming, or ignorance of scientific facts or
principles, that they are akin to nonsense.
He concluded this in an op-ed in April of this year.
Another example of this relentless hype is the reporting on the
seemingly endless number of global warming impact studies which do not
even address whether global warming is going to happen. They merely
project the impact of potential temperature increases.
The media endlessly hypes studies that purportedly show that global
warming could increase mosquito populations, malaria, West Nile virus,
heat waves and hurricanes, threaten the oceans, damage coral reefs,
boost poison ivy growth, damage vineyards and global food crops, to
name just a few of the global warming-linked calamities. Oddly,
according to the media reports, warmer temperatures almost never seem
to have any positive effects on plant or animal life or food
production.
Fortunately, the media's addiction to so-called ``climate porn'' has
failed to seduce many Americans. According to a July Pew Research
Center poll, the American public is split about evenly between those
who say global warming is due to human activity versus those who
believe it is from natural factors or not happening at all. This is
significantly down from the previous polls. In
[[Page 19160]]
addition, an August Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found that most
Americans do not attribute the cause of recent severe weather events to
global warming, and the portion of Americans who believe global warming
is naturally occurring is on the rise. It is nothing short of a miracle
and amazing that the American people are not buying this alarmism. It
is all they see on TV. It is all they hear about. I would rather
believe the American people know when their intelligence is being
insulted and they know when they are being used and when they are being
duped by the hysterical left.
The American people deserve much better from our fourth estate. We
have a right to expect accuracy and objectivity on climate change
coverage. We have a right to expect balance in sourcing and fair
analysis from reporters who cover the issue. Above all, the media must
roll back this mantra that there is scientific ``consensus'' of
impending climatic doom as an excuse to ignore recent science. I used
to get this all the time from the left. They say: Well, the consensus
is already there; we don't want to talk about science. No wonder they
don't--because most of the science since 1999 has refuted everything
they are asserting. After all, there was a so-called scientific
consensus that there were nine planets in our solar system until Pluto
was recently demoted.
I am a realist. I want to challenge the news media to reverse course
and report on the objective science of climate change, stop ignoring
legitimate voices in this scientific debate, and stop being used by the
hysterical left. Breaking the cycles of media hysteria will not be easy
since hysteria sells and it is very profitable, but I really believe
the issue is getting worn out. They have not been able to come up with
anything to support their side. And as Winston Churchill said:
The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it,
ignorance may deride it, malice may destroy it, but there it
is. And it will be there, and we will understand.
Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Coleman). The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. SALAZAR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Coleman). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. SALAZAR. Mr. President, I ask that I be recognized to speak as in
morning business for up to 20 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________
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[/rquote]
