“This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.A short supplement and a marginal note on what could turn out to be the greatest scandal in modern science. The following case, in my opinion, shows that there is something suspect about the media’s coverage of global warming.
Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz Institute is one of the most prominent climate modellers in the world—he earned several international climate-study prizes—and a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). To be more precise, Latif has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that mankind’s addiction to burning fossil fuels is rapidly changing the climate. The idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, and that they would subsequently let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land, is exactly what the global warming theory has been based on.
Yet, at the last UN’s World Climate Conference in Geneva (August 31-September 4, 2009), Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering one or even two decades during which temperatures cool. An “inconvenient truth” for global warming alarmists, who since the Kyoto accords were signed in 1997, have been telling us that the Earth is warming and will continue to warm rapidly through this century until we reach deadly temperatures around 2100. But most of the media ignored Latif’s remarks. This was the analogy made by columnist Lorne Gunter in the Calgary Herald:
Imagine if Pope Benedict gave a speech saying the Catholic Church has had it wrong all these centuries; there is no reason priests shouldn't marry. That might generate the odd headline, no?
[…] When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it's usually newsworthy.
So why was a speech […] by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute not given more prominence?
Most members of the mainstream media, in the United States and the rest of the world, seem to be interested only in viewpoints that conform with the global warming myth that they have been promoting for the past few years.
Of course this story has no direct relation with “Climategate,” but you might want to let the info be of some use.
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UPDATE: November 22, 2009, 11:45pm
This is an interesting variation on the theme:
How the MSM reported the greatest scandal in modern science
(The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, BBC)
But, you know,
As Upton Sinclair once said:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”
So don’t expect this scandal to be written up in the MSM any time soon. But why would you want to anyway? It’s all here, where the free spirits and independent thinkers are, on the Blogosphere.
Read also Climate Depot for links to all the latest updates, and An Elegant Chaos for a full reading of those potentially incriminating emails (made available in searchable form!).
