NBC in the tank for Anthropogenic Global Warming

Well, I expected it to happen, but I didn’t know who would do it. Now I do.

NBC Nightly News ran a story in which anthropogenic global warming was blamed for the October snow storm that struck the northeastern USA.

The reporter who presented the story is Anne Thompson, NBC’s chief environmental affairs correspondent.

From reading the transcript of Thompson’s report, it appears that Thompson knows nothing about the 2005 climate study by climate scientists which says that anthropgenic global warming will result in less snow, not more snow.  If Thompson missed reading about the study in “Geophysical Research Letters” (published by the American Geophysical Union), then she could have read about it in a report published by Columbia University.

Thompson’s report was made worse when she talked about a climate study headed by UC-Berkeley Professor Richard Muller. Here is an excerpt from Thompson’s report:

THOMPSON: Adding to all this, a new study that finds  global warming is real and that the science behind it is not impacted by bias,  bad data or cities that act as heat islands.

Professor RICHARD MULLER (University of  California-Berkeley): The existence of global warming, I think, is pretty much  beyond dispute now. I think we have closed the last remaining questions on  that.

THOMPSON: Muller’s study is getting a lot of attention  because it was funded in part by a foundation backed by Charles and David Koch.  They are oil billionaires and climate change deniers. Today no one can deny that  extreme weather is here to stay.

What Thompson failed to mention is the fact that Muller’s claim is disputed by Muller’s colleague Professor Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology. Curry co-authored Muller’s study, and she disagrees with Muller’s conclusion that the Earth is still getting warmer. In short, Curry is accusing Muller of hiding the decline in global warming.

Apparently Thompson’s journalistic skills are not of the same caliber of those who work for the U.K.’s Daily Mail, which first reported the dispute pertaining to Muller’s claim, or those of the Drudge Report, which let the world know about the dispute.

Well, this wouldn’t be the first time that a member of the media had blinders on.

For what it’s worth, I am open to the possibility of global warming taking place, because if it happened once (the Medieval Warm Period), then what is there to prevent it from happening again? However, I am opposed to members of the media overlooking predictions by climate scientists that prove to be false, and I am opposed to members of the media overlooking disputes within the scientific community. This brouhaha about global warming is a dispute about what will happen in the future. According to Socrates, the height of wisdom is to say, “I do not know.” Would it kill people to heed the words of Socrates?

By the way, during the 1970s a TIME magazine story also talked about the occurrence of extreme weather, and what was blamed for such extreme weather? Answer: Global Cooling.

Socrates was correct.

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Posted by David Robertson on November 4, 2011.
Filed under Global Warming.
A refugee from Planet Melmac masquerading as a human. Loves cats*. In fair condition. A fixer-upper. Warranty still good. Not necessarily sane.[*Joke in reference to the TV sit-com "Alf", which featured a space alien who liked to eat cats. Disclaimer: No cats were harmed in the writing and posting of this profile.]

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