Unbelievable. Amy Goodman just gave air time to one of the groups funded by Exxon Mobil to debunk global warming. According to the
rush transcript, this jerk Myron Ebell "oversees all global warming and international environmental work at the Competitive Enterprise Institute." This exchange with one of the other guests pretty well sums it up:
AMY GOODMAN: Ross Gelbspan, can you talk about this debate around global warming?
ROSS GELBSPAN: I can, Amy. (snip) The very fact that you are using the word debate shows how pervasive this campaign of disinformation and deception has been. There really is no debate about global warming. What you have on the one side are more 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the U.N. in what is the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history.
More over the fold.
Gelbspan continues:
What you have on the other side are basically a very small handful of so-called greenhouse skeptics, the majority of whom have been paid by the coal and oil industries, and for that reason, it has -- because of the megaphone they have been given by industry, they have created the impression in the minds of journalists that it is really a debate, and as a result, most stories, until recently, have portrayed it as a he said/she said kind of thing.And I think the public basically took the attitude after a while, that, you know, come back and tell us what you know when you make up your mind. And as a result, the public has sort of turned off to this issue, even as the signals from the planet are becoming very shrill, and the timetable for action is very slow and narrow.
I guess this is a slight improvement over the News Hour's usual approach - in that she also had two knowledgeable science writers on, whereas Lehrer gives equal time to the science and the bullshitters - but not by much. Ross Gelbspan and the other guest, Chris Mooney, who writes for The American Prospect, both have articles in the current Mother Jones. The issue is titled "As the World Burns." Mooney's article is an investigation of ExxonMobil's funding - to the tune of over $8 million - of the rightwing think tanks and other groups that are challenging the science of global warming. Gelbspan's article takes up why the U.S media pays relatively little attention to the threat of global climate change. Here's another exchange:
ROSS GELBSPAN: [When] you are asking me how serious it is, the head of this intergovernmental panel on climate change, Dr. Ragendra Pachauri, said recently that we have about a ten-year window to make very, very deep cuts in our carbon fuel use, if, quote, "humanity is to survive." This is a scientist. He speaks normally in very conservative and measured language. So, to hear that kind of talk is very, very troubling. Just to give you one last quick example, scientists have documented already the deep oceans are warming, the glaciers are melting, the icecaps are falling apart. We're seeing violent weather increase. We're seeing a change in the timing of the seasons. And all of that has happened from one degree of warming. By contrast, we're now looking to a century of three to ten degrees of warming. So, I think the urgency is very, very important.
AMY GOODMAN: Myron Ebell of Competitive Enterprise Institute, your response?
MYRON EBELL: (snip) Look, again, it's easy to talk about big, bad industry and how powerful it is. (snip) I think that may be a little exaggerated, but then what Ross Gelbspan says about global warming is very exaggerated. Dr. Pachauri, he's a conservative, buttoned-down individual, yeah. When he was in Denmark, he called Bjorn Lomborg worse than Hitler. So, look, so that's how careful he is in his speech. The global warming debate has turned from a scientific one where the I.P.C.C. publishes thousands of page reports which by and large are extremely good, which several thousand scientists work on. They do not all agree with the conclusions in the summary for policy makers, which is, you know, three 20-page summaries written by governments. These summaries then are abstracted by advocates for global warming alarmism to say, "Oh, we're going to have lots more big storms. We're going to have lots more this." No, that isn't what the report says. The report, the third assessment report -- I have it sitting here, it's a huge document published by Cambridge University Press -- is not an alarmist document. And you can go through and find some things that are alarming and a lot of reasons not to be alarmed.
Talk about trivializing! More blathering from the idiot:
MYRON EBELL: Well, you know, I don't think that the -- to go back to what Chris first said, I don't think that the statement he read from the National Academy of Sciences is alarming, and in fact, I don't see much reason to disagree with it. The fact is, it's -- there's a sort of a tissue of -- you start with the premise that the climate is changing, and pretty soon, you are talking about how scary it is. Well, the climate is changing all the time. The impacts are significant. If you look at the United States, for example, there is no warming or cooling trend if you average out the entire country. That's true for quite a long time going back into the past. However, there are significant climate changes going on. The Pacific Northwest is warming up. The Atlantic Southeast, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas, are cooling down. These are long term trends, 30, 40 years. They're very significant. They have costs. They have environmental impact. And we have to deal with it. You can't predict, on the basis of knowing what the global mean temperature is and whether it's going up or going down, that the Pacific Northwest is warming up and the Atlantic Southeast is cooling down. There's no way to get that. So, again, I think it's -- a lot of the alarmism is based on absolutely un-alarming statements, which have been sort of whipped up into a frenzy by people who really ought to know better.
I'm currently reading Elizabeth Kolbert's piece in the current New Yorker that details research in the Arctic on thawing of the surface permafrost, exactly the kind of indicator that isn't "changing all the time" and provides definitive proof of dangerous climate change underway.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Ross Gelbspan, giving you the last word.
ROSS GELBSPAN: Real briefly, what Myron is saying about temperatures is really very, very misleading. 1998 was the hottest year on record, and 2001 replaced 1997 as number two. 2004 was the fourth hottest year on record. So, globally what's happening is that the planet is warming. And what we're seeing also is a much more unstable kind of climate with many more storms and more changes and more surprises. We're seeing shorter, more severe winters, which will begin to take a much bigger toll on agriculture. There's no question about the larger trends of what's happening in the climate, regardless of how you cut it. And as the head of the I.P.C.C. said a couple of years ago, there is no debate among any statured scientist at all about the larger trends of what's happening to the climate. So, I think that's very disingenuous. And I think it's very important to understand again that we have a really short time for action.
And I'll go back to one study that was put out by a major group of scientists and policymakers at the beginning of the year, which said that we now have 380 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Traditionally that number was 280. When it reaches 400 parts per million, which will be within the next 10-15 years, that correlates with an increase of 2 degrees Celsius in the average global temperature, and that is the point at which a lot of impacts begin to sort of take on their own momentum and become runaway impacts. So scientists are really concerned about changes in the Gulf Stream, rapid temperature changes, die-offs of the forests, all kinds of things like this, which will begin to happen in a very, very short time if we keep pumping out all of these carbon fuels. And this is not alarmism. This is from the scientific community. And there is really no debate about what's happening to the climate among the mainstream body of climate scientists.
This segment was followed by a discussion of the Armenian genocide with a serious historian and a representative of the Armenian National Committee of America. If Amy had taken the same approach to this subject as she did to climate change, she would have also had a representative of the Turkish government to explain why there wasn't any genocide!