Nancy Thorner:
It was on September 27 that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered to massive media coverage an unsettling message: Climate change is real, humans are the main cause of it, and unless we stop the warming of the planet, in 50 years life as we know it will be no more.
A little more than a week before, on Sept. 18, a dueling climate change report was issued (published by Chicago’s Heartland Institute) by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science.
The NIPCC report, in keeping with past precedent, was not accorded the same fanfare as received by the UN’s IPCC report upon its release. To the contrary, media attention for Heartland’s NIPCC report was practically nonexistent as was observed at the Sept. 18 press conference held by Heartland in Chicago to announce the release of its report.
As a skeptic of global warming, a welcome mat does not exist in Chicago for The Heartland Institute as its message goes against the accepted media message of the Chicago Tribune, etc., that global warming is man-made with CO2 as the main culprit.
A slew of scathing reports followed the release of Heartland’s NIPCC report, such as this from Climate Science Watch:
The discredited Heartland Institute is attempting to present its new NIPCC report, Climate Change Reconsidered, as a legitimate alternative authority to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the NIPCC report is not a credible scientific undertaking, and the Heartland Institute has no credibility, scientific or otherwise.
To protect the stellar credentials of The Heartland Institute, President Joseph Bast offered the following essay:
We urge the public to compare and contrast these two reports on what is probably the most important public policy issue of our age. The NIPCC report was produced by a team of independent scientists with no agenda other than to find the truth. . . . The IPCC study, in contrast, is produced by a government agency, part of the United Nations. That agency’s mission is to find a human impact on climate. . . .
The NIPCC report finds the human impact on climate is very small, and as a result, any warming that may be due to human greenhouse gas emissions is likely to be so small as to be invisible against a background of natural variability. The authors of the NIPCC study do not believe man-made global warming is a crisis, or that scientists know enough about how the climate works to make policy-relevant recommendations to the world’s government leaders.
Without question President Obama and his administration are in lock step with the UN’s highly flawed report that calls for action now to fight climate change before time runs out. Accordingly, it’s full steam ahead for Obama and his administration.
On November 1, Obama offered a presidential directive to “enhance climate preparedness and resilience.” The directive calls for an interagency Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience in partnership with state, county, local and tribal governments, by which Obama aims to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 17% by 2020 from 2005 levels. Even the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline hinges upon a determination of what will be the net effects of the pipeline’s impact on our climate.
But what do the American people think? Might they be seeing through the story they are being fed by the mainstream media? According to the Pew Research Center’s policy priorities survey, this year the American public ranked dealing with global warming at the very bottom of 21 listed priorities. Even so 35% of Republicans, 53% of independents, and 75% of Democrats believe there is solid evidence of rising temperatures on earth.
According to Michael Bastasch, the American people should be holding their champagne glasses high this holiday season as the end of 2013 marks the 17th year without global warming. Explaining away the 17-year hiatus in global despite the setbacks noted below, can be achieved only if political ideology is permitted to trump proven scientific facts.
