--- Santosh Helekar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >In my next post on this thread I will demonstrate to >you why the article on Global Warming that was posted >by this man in his last post was a striking example >of vicious right-wing propaganda, and why I think his >and that article�s main intention was to suggest that >global warming was entirely or primarily a natural >occurrence, devoid of any human involvement. >
As promised in my previous post (quoted above) in this thread, I would like to tell you here why the article mentioned in the following quote, posted in this thread by another Goanetter is a striking example of vicious right-wing propaganda: "Tim, put down the feni bottle, and read the following article that appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on December 27, 2004. I would like you to focus on paragraphs 7 and 8 in the article. Maybe you will learn something. Global warming: The new religion Monday, December 27, 2004" As I have said before Global Warming is a scientific problem. However, especially in America, it has become a political issue. Editorials and opinion editorials fly left and right in newspapers and news magazines, written by editors and columnists who themselves know very little of science, and whose interest in science is limited to using it to score political points. It is very easy to do this because they can selectively quote from casual remarks made by career scientists, or from opinions, stated for public consumption, of one or two mainstream scientists who dispute some of the conclusions of a consensus position based on technical, often genuine but contentious, grounds. They can also selectively quote from scientific studies (or from lay distorted accounts on them) whose conclusions have become obsolete due to subsequent more refined measurements and interpretations. A non-scientist does not usually appreciate very well the fact that science is a progressive enterprise, with an evolving consensus on many issues at its cutting edge. Selective use of information to support one�s position, and contemptuous disregard for rational counterarguments, and even empirical counter-evidence, is the mainstay of politics, opinion journalism and law. Science, on the other hand, is largely a dispassionate endeavor where objectivity is critical to acceptance of new knowledge and its publication in mainstream scientific journals. Objectivity in science is maintained by two important self-correcting mechanisms, namely peer-review and reproducibility. I have written quite a lot about these mechanisms in this forum over the years, so I will not repeat it here. The above two paragraphs should provide you some background to understand why the Global Warming article under question is a striking example of vicious right-wing propaganda. That article is an opinion editorial in one of the most conservative newspapers in America, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, owned by the eccentric right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon-Scaife. It is not an objective popular review on Global Warming in a popular science or educational magazine, such as National Geographic, meant to inform the lay public. No responsible person without a political agenda would ever recommend anybody in a general public forum any editorial of Pittsburgh Tribune Review to "may be learn something" about Global Warming. The right-wing political position on Global Warming in America is either that it is not occurring at all at present or that it is completely or primarily a natural phenomenon i. e. human activities involving emission of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases from burning of fossil fuels have nothing to do with it. The writer(s) of the said editorial perhaps concede that global warming is occurring at present, but clearly want to peddle their other political view that it is not something unnatural. Indeed, this is exactly what the poster of that editorial in this forum, hinted in the following quote, before recommending it to another netter so that "maybe he will learn something": "Tim de Mello, who operates on feni fumes and would like to believe that global warming is something unnatural" The poster recommended the following two paragraphs, in particular, from the said editorial to maybe expand the knowledge of Tim de Mello: "The Earth warmed in the Middle Ages, up to a peak around 1300 when it was perhaps 2 degrees warmer than now, whereupon the Little Ice Age ensued until about 1900." "We'd like to have that explained in the context of "man-made global warming."" The truth is that the above two paragraphs refer to outdated findings and interpretations about the time course of global temperature change in the last two millennia. A long and detailed scientific paper published recently in a mainstream peer-reviewed scientific journal by two expert climatologists has concluded that the evidence for the warming of the Earth during the Middle Ages, otherwise known as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), as well as to a lesser extent for the Little Ice Age (LIA), is very limited and does not justify their special identification and comparison with the latest epoch (the late 20th century) of global warming. The late 20th century global warming is anomalous and without precedent. Here are the relevant quotes from the summary of that scholarly paper: "The dramatic differences between regional and hemispheric/global past trends, and the distinction between changes in surface temperature and precipitation/drought fields, underscore the limited utility in the use of terms such as the 'Little Ice Age' and 'Medieval Warm Period' for describing past climate epochs during the last millennium." "Our assessment affirms the conclusion that late 20th century warmth is unprecedented at hemispheric and, likely, global scales." The public information website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration actually states categorically that "the idea of a global or hemispheric 'Medieval Warm Period' that was warmer than today however, has turned out to be incorrect." Here is the link for this website: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/medieval.html. Moreover, the scholarly paper referred to above has explained in detail how these periods (i. e. time periods corresponding to the so-called MWP and LIA) can be accounted for entirely by natural, and not man-made, processes. It also states categorically by considering all available evidence that current global warming can only be explained as being man-made. Here are the relevant quotes from its summary: "We review evidence for climate change over the past several millennia from instrumental and high-resolution climate �proxy� data sources and climate modeling studies." "Comparison of empirical evidence with proxy-based reconstructions demonstrates that natural factors appear to explain relatively well the major surface temperature changes of the past millennium through the 19th century (including hemispheric means and some spatial patterns). Only anthropogenic (man-made) forcing of climate, however, can explain the recent anomalous warming in the late 20th century." Therefore, the paragraph 8 in the said editorial "maybe" misinforms Tim de Mello, or "maybe" only teaches him the fact that the editors of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review are ignorant about the current state of knowledge on Global Warming, and are intellectually dishonest or lazy. The scholarly article I am referring to is entitled "CLIMATE OVER PAST MILLENNIA". It was published on May 6, 2004 in the scientific journal "Reviews of Geophysics", a respected official publication of the American Geophysical Union. It was written by P. D. Jones of the Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, and M. E. Mann of the Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. You can access it at the following anonymous ftp location if you want (But please note that it is in PDF format, highly technical and 42 pages long): ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub/mann/JonesMannROG04.pdf There is a broad and deep scientific consensus now that the late 20th century global warming is unprecedented and substantially man-made. Please read the following commentary published on December 3, 2004 in SCIENCE, one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world: "BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change By Naomi Oreskes." It can be accessed at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686 (you might need a subscription to SCIENCE to access it. If so, please email me to obtain it). This commentary mentions that there is not a single peer-reviewed scientific article disputing the consensus position among 928 such articles published on the topic of global climate change since 1993. It also states that in recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members� expertise bears directly on the matter, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and international organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all have issued statements concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling. It should be clear from the above that the opinion editorial in Pittsburgh Tribune Review is a patently erroneous propaganda statement on Global Warming made to promote the right-wing agenda of that extremely conservative newspaper on this important scientific issue. It is a particularly vicious opinion piece because it shows nothing but contempt for the scientific proponents of the Global Warming theory by calling it a "new religion" in its title, belittling and smearing the proponents as "hysterics" and "extremists", and ridiculing the current scientific activity in this subject in puerile manner by cheap references to "witch-burning", "Christmastide", "nuclear Santaship", "Rudolph" and "the North Pole". That editorial should be an embarrassment to anybody who recommends it as a learning resource on global warming to a fellow netter, even as a joke, accompanied by "comments made jokingly". Cheers, Santosh
