Sen. James Inhofe’s (R-OK) September 26 address on the Senate floor raised howls of protest from climate variance alarmists, led by CNN’s Miles O’Brien, who attempted to discredit Inhofe on his September 28 program.
Later that day, on the Committee on Environment and Public Works Web site, Inhofe offered the following rebuttal to O’Brien’s assertions.
This morning, CNN ran a segment criticizing my speech on global warming and attempted to refute the scientific evidence I presented to counter climate fears.
Summary of Smears
First off, CNN reporter Miles O’Brien inaccurately claimed I was “too busy” to appear on his program this week to discuss my 50-minute floor speech on global warming. But they were told I simply was not available on Tuesday or Wednesday.
Second, CNN’s O’Brien falsely claimed that I was all “alone on Capitol Hill” when it comes to questioning global warming.
Mr. O’Brien is obviously not aware that the U.S. Senate has overwhelmingly rejected Kyoto-style carbon caps when it voted down the McCain-Lieberman climate bill 60-28 last year–an even larger margin than its rejection in 2003.
Third, CNN’s O’Brien claimed that my speech earlier contained errors regarding climate science. O’Brien said my claim that the Antarctic was actually cooling and gaining ice was incorrect. But both the journals Science and Nature have published studies recently finding on balance Antarctica is both cooling and gaining ice.
More CNN Falsehoods
CNN’s O’Brien also criticized me for saying polar bears are thriving in the Arctic. But he ignored that the person I was quoting is intimately familiar with the health of polar bear populations. Let me repeat what biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the Arctic government of Nunavut, a territory of Canada, said recently:
“Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.”
CNN’s O’Brien also ignores the fact that in the Arctic, temperatures were warmer in the 1930s than today.
O’Brien also claimed that the “hockey stick” temperature graph was supported by most climate scientists despite the fact that the National Academy of Sciences and many independent experts have made it clear that the hockey stick’s claim that the 1990s was the hottest decade of the last 1,000 years was unsupportable.
So it seems my speech struck a nerve with the mainstream media. Their only response was to cherry-pick the science in a failed attempt to refute me.
It seems that it is business as usual for many of them. Sadly, it looks like my challenge to the media to be objective and balanced has fallen on deaf ears.
Bypassing Mainstream Media
Despite the traditional media’s failed attempt to dismiss the science I presented to counter global warming alarmism, the American people bypassed the tired old traditional media by watching CSPAN or clicking on the Drudge Report and reading the speech online.
From the flood of overwhelming positive feedback I received, I can tell you the American people responded enthusiastically to my message.
The central theme was not only one of thanks, but expressing frustration with the major media outlets because they knew in their guts that what they have been hearing in the news was false and misleading.
My speech ignited an Internet firestorm. So much so, that my speech became the subject of a heated media controversy in New Zealand. Halfway across the globe, a top official from the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition challenged New Zealand’s television station to balance what he termed “alarmist doom-casting” and criticized them for failing to report the views of scientists in their own country that I cited here in America.
As the controversy in New Zealand shows, global warming hysteria has captured more than just the American media.
Continued Reaction
The reaction to my speech keeps coming in: Just this morning, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper wrote an editorial calling my speech “an unusual display of reason” on the Senate floor.
I do have to give credit to another publication, Congressional Quarterly, or CQ for short. On Tuesday, CQ’s Toni Johnson took the issues I raised seriously and followed up with phone calls to scientist-turned-global-warming-pop-star James Hansen’s office. CQ wanted to ask Hansen about his quarter-of-a-million dollar grant from the left-wing Heinz Foundation, whose money originated from the Heinz family ketchup fortune.
As I have pointed out, many in the media dwell on any industry support given to so-called climate skeptics, but the same media completely fail to note Hansen’s huge grant from the partisan Heinz Foundation. It seems the media makes a distinction between ketchup money and oil money.
But Hansen was unavailable to respond to CQ’s questions about the ‘Ketchup Money’ grant, which is highly unusual for a man who finds his way into the media on an almost daily basis. Mr. Hansen is always available when he is peddling his increasingly dire predictions of climate doom.
ABC Promotes Hysteria
I have been engaged in this debate for several years and believe there is a growing backlash of Americans rejecting what they see as climate scare tactics. And as a result, global warming alarmists are becoming increasingly desperate.
Perhaps that explains why the very next day after I spoke on the floor, ABC News’s Bill Blakemore on Good Morning America prominently featured James Hansen touting future scary climate scenarios that could/might/possibly happen. ABC’s “modest” title for the segment was “Will the Earth Become Too Hot? Are Our Children in Danger?”
The segment used all the well-worn tactics from the alarmist guidebook–warning of heat waves, wildfires, droughts, melting glaciers, mass extinctions … unless mankind put itself on a starvation energy diet and taxed emissions.
But that’s no surprise. Blakemore was already on the record declaring, “After extensive searches, ABC News has found no such [scientific] debate” about manmade catastrophic global warming.
You have to be a pretty poor investigator to believe that. Why would 60 prominent scientists this last spring have written Canadian Prime Minister Harper that, “If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.”
On Tuesday’s program, the ABC News anchor referred to Blakemore as “passionate” about global warming. “Passionate” is one word to describe that kind of reporting, but words like objectivity or balance are not.
Increasing Public Skepticism
I believe it’s these kinds of stories which explain why the American public is growing increasingly skeptical of the hype. Despite the enormous 2006 media campaign to instill fear into the public, the number of people who believe that weather naturally changes–is increasing.
A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll in August found that most Americans do not attribute the cause of recent severe weather events to global warming, and the portion of Americans who believe that climate change is due to natural variability has increased over 50 percent in the last five years.
Given the diminishing importance of the mainstream media, I expect that trend to continue.
I hope my other colleagues will join me on the floor and start speaking out to debunk hysteria surrounding global warming. This issue is too important to our generation and future generations to allow distortions and media propaganda to derail the economic health of our nation.
