14 May 2013
Global Cooling Is A Silly Myth
Posted by Dan Satterfield
Kudos to John Cook who uses a short video to explain something that the public in general does not easily understand. You can say it over and over but seeing is believing. The entire video is below. I buried the lead on purpose!
John Cook over at Skeptical Science has produced an excellent video, that explains why anyone who telling you the climate has stopped warming, or that the planet is now cooling is wrong.
Utterly wrong. It’s in the same league as HAARP and Chem-trails.
This video comes out in the same week that the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by William Happer and Harrison Schmidt that contained all the usual canards. All of course have long been shown to be wrong or totally immaterial by real scientists. The difference here is that it wasn’t lazy journalism. They’ve have been told this over and over by the top scientists in the world.
Physicist Joe Romm who writes the blog Climate Progress had this to say about the editorial :
“No, it’s not The Onion. It’s The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which nowadays is much the same thing.
Once again, the country’s leading financial newspaper is recycling long-debunked myths from disinformers with PhDs posing as climate scientists — in this case, Harrison H. Schmitt and William Happer, “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide: The demonized chemical compound is a boon to plant life and has little correlation with global temperature.”…But this piece is a new low. “It’s shameful even by the dismal standards of that page,” as Columbia Journalism Review puts its in their piece, “The WSJ editorial page hits rock bottom.”
The entire piece is devoted to one of the most risible logical fallacies pushed by the deniers — that because CO2 stimulates plant growth, lots more CO2 must be great for plants. It’s like arguing that because humans need water to live, floods must be a great thing.
You may remember Schmitt and Happer as 2 of the 16 authors of a 2012 WSJ op-ed who were labeled “dentists practicing cardiology” by 3 dozen top climate scientists. As Media Matters explains:
- Neither Have Written Peer-Reviewed Climate Research.
- Journal Does Not Disclose Happer Is Chairman Of Industry-Funded Institute
- Happer Compared Mainstream Climate Science To Holocaust “Propaganda.”
- Schmitt Was A Director At The Industry-Funded Heartland Institute.
- Schmitt: The “Obvious Path Of The United States” Under “Current Congress And President” Is “National Socialism.”
Slanting the news is yellow journalism, and mixing a little truth with a bunch of lies (and half-truths) is propaganda, but what the WSJ did is RED journalism. Red standing for STOP!, this is not journalism!
It’s simply pandering to readers who would rather hear a lie that fits their world view rather than the truth.
“Dentists practicing cardiology” sums it up perfectly. Between the Schmidt piece and that editorial ,the WSJ deserves the firestorm of criticism from the science community they received this week. This puts them right in with the Australian as purveyors of flat-out lies masquerading as scientific thought. What a strange coincidence, it seems they are both owned by the same person….
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.