Saturday, January 1, 2011

Fox News Fails To Make Light Of Climate Science

How can you tell which side is losing an argument? When they resort to cheap tricks like this. Fox News posts the article, "Eight Botched Environmental Forecasts". You can go read the article if you are interested in reading those 8 botched environmental forecasts (most of which are "he said X would happen in Y years and only half or a third of X happened in Y plus 5 or 10 years", and a couple of which were scientists engaging in a bit of needless hyperbole). What I would like to point out is the dates of those botched forecasts:

1. March 20, 2000... 11 years ago.
2. 1990... 21 years ago.
3. May 15, 1989... 22 years ago.
4. June 8, 1972... 39 years ago.
5. September 1971... 39 years ago.
6. January 1970... 41 years ago.
7. 1970... 41 years ago.
8. 1970... 41 years ago.

So the most recent example Fox News could find of climate scientists' "botched forecasts" was 11 years ago. They needed to go back a quarter of a century to find a second "botched forecast". After that had to go back to the days of Woodstock and Moon Missions to find more than three erroneous expectations of climate science.

Actually, I'm guessing that some poor intern at Fox News was probably given this assignment by some party-line fanatic wanting to do his duty in daily propaganda dissemination: "It's the end of the year. Everybody has top 10 lists. So write an article called 'The Top 10 Botched Climate Forecasts of All Time'." and this shortfall was the result.

Yes, I know there are reasons to rail against climate and environmental regulations, when countries like China aren't doing their part and are making more of a mess of the planet than The United States is (though not by much). However, still trying to win the argument that climate change is not happening / not manmade is so 2006.

(SOURCE)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

the corporations are ruining the planet and the governments they tell what to do arent going to stop them.the third world wants those governments to pay for the damage the corporations have done which sucks if they get a dime of taxpayer money from those governments.a vicious cycle where nothing gets done and MOTHER EARTH will have to intervene and shake the Human-beings off as a dog shakes off a bad case of the fleas,permanently.

Jil Wrinkle said...

According to several climate scientists (I don't have a link, sorry), we have already passed a point where "doing something" will make a difference: The changes that have been started by man are now sufficient enough to create additional changes in the climate on their own without additional human help.

I don't think that the earth will kill the entire human species, but I do think that humanity is in for a new century or two of a dark age, where famine, war, and disease all show up and knock the human population way back. And, to be honest, America will probably come out on top of the heap because it is the best stocked and prepared and peopled enough to deal with such a world changing situation. Of course, it will be a United States where Florida is under water, Iowa looks like Texas, and the Dakotas and Montana are the new breadbasket... but it will make it.

Anonymous said...

You are joking, right?
If you really believe man is responsible for climate change, then you are easily fooled by some clever people. I guess ancient man caused the earth to warm and bring an end to the ice-age.
Just maybe the cycles of the earth's temperatures are caused by something far greater than man-made causes. Just maybe it is the Sun and its cycles of sunspots, or maybe tilt of the earth, or CO2 from natural sources.

Man has little or no effect on global warming, do some research and find something other than junk science to explain why the earth has gone through cold and warming cycles since it was formed. I highly doubt man caused the period known as the Holocene Maximum, which was the hottest period in human history and occurred over 4000 to 7500 thousand years ago. I guess all those big corporations back then were polluting like crazy.

To get you started, read the true facts here: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html

Jil Wrinkle said...

Heheh... that's funny, creating a sequitur between what took 2,000 years to happen then and what has taken 20 years to happen now.

Also funny: Attempting to blame "sun spots" or the "earth's tilt" or "CO2 from natural sources" — as if such massively measurable and noticeable things might be sneaking in unnoticed by humanity. "Good god! While we weren't looking, the earth's axis moved by 2 degrees! Who the hell missed that???" (Even the guys at Stonehenge would have noticed if the solstice sun wasn't in the same place from year to year.)

Jil Wrinkle said...

By the way, it's a common (but dated) argument: "Forest fires and volcanos erupting are bigger greenhouse gas problems than people."

First, note this fact: Burning wood releases the same amount of CO2 as decaying wood. So whether a tree falls over and rots, or burns... over the long term, the CO2 emission is the same.

Second, a volcano is estimated to yield about 300,000 tons of CO2 per day of eruption. Compare that to 158,000 tons of C02 per day produced just in the New York City area alone, and you'll see that volcanos, in the grand scheme of things, don't put that much CO2 into the atmosphere.

Anonymous said...

climate change science is still in its infancy....imagine what we will know in 20 years. Trillions of tons of frozen and dissolved methane gas is present in our worlds oceans.....its 32 times more potent a green house gas than CO2....yet there has been limited study by climatologist on this issue.

Nor has there been any media attention given to a 2004 AAPG climate study using ice cores...showing the CO2 increases actual "lag" global warming. The study indicates the CO2 increases are not creating the warming, but are a direct result of global warming.

World oil and gas supplies have less than 30 years to go....so we will be using nuclear power as dominate energy source very soon.