New York Times Wishful Thinking

The NYT is allegedly covering the Heartland conference with a variety of speakers pointing out the numerous problems with global warming hysteria.  Of course in one of the very few events of its kind, the NYT spends more than half the article refuting the claims by those presenting.  When you get sick of the NYT, Anthony Watts has a nice post on the first day of presentations HERE.

The always balanced NYT article Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other

Like always, I get wound up over this stuff.  I shouldn’t read the news.

More than 600 self-professed climate skeptics are meeting in a Times Square hotel this week to challenge what has become a broad scientific and political consensus: that without big changes in energy choices, humans will dangerously heat up the planet.

This is the first line in the article.  Proclamation of scientific consensus.  Well I’m not convinced yet and nearly everyone who reads the Air Vent knows a dozen reasons why there isn’t a scientific consensus as many of them are scientists and engineers themselves.  If you’re stopping by for the first time, my readers consist of a wide variety of professionals fully qualified to read an interpret climatology science  including engineers, climatologists, biologists, college professors, informed laymen and others.  How is it that so many people can’t seem to locate this alleged consensus?

Well at least the times got the part about a broad political consensus right.  As laid out by European Union and Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus and summarized by professor Bob Carter at WUWT.

The President commenced his talk by commenting that little change had occurred in the global warming debate since his talk, 12 months earlier, at the Heartland-1 conference. He likened the situation to his former experience under communist government, where arguing against the dominant viewpoint falls into emptiness. No matter how high the quality of the arguments and evidence that you advance against the dangerous warming idea, nobody listens, and by even advancing skeptical arguments you are dismissed as a naïve and uninformed person.

The reporters of the NYT article then turn around and do exactly what the President was claiming occurs, he attempts to marginalize and segregate skeptics.

But two years after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded with near certainty that most of the recent warming was a result of human influences, global warming’s skeptics are showing signs of internal rifts and weakening support.

This is like the third paragraph represents nothing to do with reality and is at best is propaganda.  Skeptics have always shared common views on these points.  Many see problems in different areas and interpret the results differently. Unfortunately for the NYT’s know nothing reporter ANDREW C. REVKIN, this is not a sign of weakness but rather of the healthy debate amongst scientists.

Let’s see what else our brilliant guide to the climate conference has to add.

But large corporations like Exxon Mobil, which in the past financed the Heartland Institute and other groups that challenged the climate consensus, have reduced support. Many such companies no longer dispute that the greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels pose risks.

From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil, for example, contributed more than $600,000 to Heartland, according to annual reports of charitable contributions from the company and company foundations.

I hope people realize that this is the big oil money we always hear about.  Six hundred thoushand over a period of 8 years.  This is not exactly a huge fund.   Andi want’s you to think, , , no he hopes you will believe the skeptics are loosing. Yet the facts are the opposite public opinion of global warming is going in the opposite direction of the hockey stick and the conference doubled in size from last year.  With speakers of the level of the President of the EU, shouldn’t the headline read a little different!! What would happen if Obama made a speech at a conference in Europe outlining why their governments should support global warming?

Andi then seeks out the most extreme views he can find at the conference.

But Kert Davies, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace, who is attending the Heartland event, said that the experts giving talks were “a shrinking collection of extremists” and that they were “left talking to themselves.”

Get that greenpeace wacko’s calling skeptical scientists extremists,  and that is news!

In a keynote talk Sunday night, Richard S. Lindzen, a professor at M.I.T. and a longtime skeptic of the mainstream consensus that global warming poses a danger, first delivered a biting attack on what he called the “climate alarm movement.”

There is no solid scientific evidence to back up the models used by climate scientists who warn of dire consequences if warming continues, he said. But Dr. Lindzen also criticized widely publicized assertions by other skeptics that variations in the sun were driving temperature changes in recent decades. To attribute short-term variation in temperatures to a single cause, whether human-generated gases or something else, is erroneous, he said.

Speaking of the sun’s slight variability, he said, “Acting as though this is the alternative” to blaming greenhouse gases “is asking for trouble.”

Andi has set the tone of his article to paint the above argument as a weakness.  The solar arguments are still under debate as many of us know.  Arguing for the variation in irradiance itself as the driver is quite a weak point, somewhat akin to those who believe volcanoes are warming the climate by direct heating.  However, the solar winds and their interaction with intersteller winds is still an unknown quantity due to their roles in cloud formation.  We the honest humans,  just don’t know the answers.

There are notable absences from the conference this year. Russell Seitz, a physicist from Cambridge, Mass., gave a talk at last year’s meeting. But Dr. Seitz, who has lambasted environmental campaigners as distorting climate science, now warns that the skeptics are in danger of doing the same thing.

The most strident advocates on either side of the global warming debate, he said, are “equally oblivious to the data they seek to discount or dramatize.”

Andi goes from the conference then to John Christy, a prominent climate scientist who makes a very reasonable statement which demonstrates the fear of association with the skeptics.  Note, he does not state a disagreement with the concept.

John H. Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama who has long publicly questioned projections of dangerous global warming, most recently at a House committee hearing last month, said he had skipped both Heartland conferences to avoid the potential for “guilt by association.”

Apparently Andi went to the conference looking for his pre-concluded idea for an article, catch this next sentence.  — He really did write it.  This guy went around questioning people about dissent in the skeptics conference and got the answers he wanted from greenpeace!

Many participants said that any division or dissent was minor and that the global recession and a series of years with cooler temperatures would help them in combating changes in energy policy in Washington.

“The only place where this alleged climate catastrophe is happening is in the virtual world of computer models, not in the real world,” said Marc Morano, a speaker at the meeting and a spokesman on environmental issues for Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma.

Being the effective and balanced reporter Andi apparently is, he finishes with the following from a Dr. Schneider.  This is a different Schneider from Tapio Schneider of RegEM or David Schneider of the Antarctic paper.

But several climate scientists who are seeking to curb greenhouse gases strongly criticized the meeting. Stephen H. Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University and an author of many reports by the intergovernmental climate panel, said, after reviewing the text of presentations for the Heartland meeting, that they were efforts to “bamboozle the innocent.”

And then the people whom hold our best interests at heart, the glorious UN politicians.  This bit forced me to make a post because it basically says it all.

Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations office managing international treaty talks on climate change, said, “I don’t believe that what the skeptics say should provide any excuse to delay further” action against global warming.

But he added: “Skeptics are good. It’s important to give people the confidence that the issue is being called into question.”

Translation:  Rational arguments against our conclusions should not delay our funding or our plans for increased funding.  Skeptics are good because it makes our funding appear more balanced.