Global Warming Denier!

Jeff Jacoby from the Boston Globe wrote a great column about Newsweek's August 13 cover story on Global Warming denial. Newsweek takes the easy route and accuses the "deniers" or "doubters" as being aligned with big coal and big oil in an effort to discredit them. Their story is an weak attempt to discredit anybody who doubts that man causes global warming. Interestingly, they bring up the reporting they did in 1975 when they claimed global cooling was the threat to our planet but they quickly dismiss it because there wasn't near the "consensus" there is today regarding global warming.

Mr. Jacoby takes them on Newsweek citing their doomsday reporting on global cooling in 1975.

Then, the magazine reported that scientists were "almost unanimous" in believing that the looming Big Chill would mean a decline in food production, with some warning that "the resulting famines could be catastrophic." Moreover, it said, "the evidence in support of these predictions" -- everything from shrinking growing seasons to increased North American snow cover -- had "begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."

He also goes into the their tactic of discrediting "doubters" as bought and paid for lackeys of industry.

anyone skeptical of the claim that human activity is causing global warming is painted as a bought-and-paid-for lackey of the coal and oil industries -- so strident and censorious? Why the relentless labeling of those who point out weaknesses in the global-warming models as "deniers," or agents of the "denial machine," or deceptive practitioners of "denialism?" Wouldn't it be more effective to answer the challengers, some of whom are highly credentialed climate scientists in their own right, with scientific data and arguments, instead of snide insinuations of venality and deceit? Do Newsweek and Begley really believe that everyone who dissents from the global-warming doomsaying does so in bad faith?

My favorite paragraph touches on the scientific process and how humans causing global warming is still only just a hypothesis.

Anthropogenic global warming is a scientific hypothesis, not an article of religious or ideological dogma. Skepticism and doubt are entirely appropriate in the realm of science, in which truth is determined by evidence, experimentation, and observation, not by consensus or revelation. Yet when it comes to global warming, dissent is treated as heresy -- as a pernicious belief whose exponents must be shamed, shunned, or silenced.

He also talks about how many who support this hypothesis want to have debate shut down and silence those who dispute that human activity causes global warming.

Some environmentalists and commentators have suggested that global-warming "denial" be made a crime, much as Holocaust denial is in some countries. Others have proposed that climate-change dissidents be prosecuted in Nuremberg-style trials. The Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen has suggested that television meteorologists be stripped of their American Meteorological Society certification if they dare to question predictions of catastrophic global warming.

This made me think. Because of their intense desire to shut down the debate on what is clearly only a hypothesis they are not terribly confident that this hypothesis can withstand serious and thoughtful scrutiny. In other words, if they were 100% confident that humans caused global warming, they should welcome any and all debate and evidence for or against it, knowing that when all evidence is in, it will be proven to be a fact.