Global Warming: Temperatures have flat-lined for 15 years, the Arctic and Antarctic are gaining record amounts of ice, most computer models have been wrong, yet the networks are buying into the alarmists' narrative.
Earth might not have a fever but the media do, judging by their hyperventilating about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's quite fraudulent report (Fifth Assessment Report or 5AR) released Sept. 27. One network — CBS— even turned a blind eye to the truth and claimed that temperatures "could have risen by more than 200 degrees."
This fiction came from CBS' Ben Tracy, who said the carbon dioxide absorbed into the ocean is a time bomb already impacting sea life. Tracy said the oceans have absorbed much of the heat caused by increasing CO2 levels and claimed that had "all that heat gone into the atmosphere, air temperatures could have risen by more than 200 degrees," while "212 degrees" appeared in graphics.
In other words, were it not for the oceans, Earth would be Venus. But what Tracy should have concluded is our world is not all that fragile and is a self-regulating entity where temperatures are not a straight-line path to doom but rather a fluctuating condition over millennia. Similarly, ice ages, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and the like come and go in cycles.
NBC and ABC were only slightly less hysterical. ABC flashed "big warning" onscreen as it announced the "landmark" report from "top scientists." NBC predictably linked strong storms such as Hurricane Sandy to climate change. They all swallowed the IPCC report whole, providing no time to "top scientists," such as Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, who question the "settled science" of climate change.
Easterbrook, professor of geology at Western Washington University, wrote in a recent essay that "Mark Twain popularized the saying 'There are liars, damn liars, and statisticians.'" But, after he read the IPCC AR5 report, he said "we can now add, 'there are liars, damn liars, and IPCC.'"
Easterbrook reminds us a "vast published literature exists showing that recent warming is not only not unusual, but more intense warming has occurred many times in the past centuries and millennia."
"As a reviewer of the IPCC report," he said, "I called this to their attention, so they cannot have been unaware of it."
Two years ago, Easterbrook wrote that "there have been at least three periods of warming/cooling in the past 15,000 years that have been 20 times more intense, and at least 15 have been five times as intense."