Cold Can't Shake Global Warming Faith of ABC's Blakemore
By Matthew Philbin | January 08, 2010 | 15:21
As global warming alarmists get more desperate, they’re turning to allies in the mainstream media to help promote increasingly strident protests that the world really is warming.
Nobody is happier to oblige than ABC News. On Jan. 8, “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer and weatherman Sam Champion worried that the cold weather engulfing much of the world just may be the result of climate change.
Then there’s ABC’s Bill Blakemore. The title of his Jan. 8 ABC News.com article – which could only be a mislabeled op-ed – pretty much summed up his take: “No, the Cold Doesn’t Mean No Global Warming.”
“This is, of course, an old story,” wrote Blakemore, “ ... and more and more 5th graders are bringing it home from their science classes to get their parents up to date on the latest climate science.”
Those properly indoctrinated young folk know three things that stupid, skeptical adults don’t: “Weather is not climate;” “Manmade global warming means less frequent cold snaps (not none at all) and more frequent heat waves;” and there are “record high temperatures this week in Washington State, Alaska and Bulgaria in the Northern Hemisphere,” and in New Zealand and Australia.
Blakemore went on to cite six sources (two of them journalists) that all agreed that just because it is cold doesn’t mean the planet isn’t warming. Weather, they said, is “chaotic.”
Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Blakemore, “Weather dominates on a day-to-day basis, and there will be warmer periods and cooler periods. But it's the overall pattern that gives you the climate.”
Blakemore elaborated, for the benefit of those us not fortunate enough to be enrolled in a grade school science class, on the time frame that constitutes “the overall pattern.”
“Climate is long-term and regional (or bigger),” he wrote, referring to a climate chart covering the last 130 years. Year to year climate fluctuates, but the decadal average is it the important thing.
But if “long-term and regional” are what determines climate, shouldn’t Blakemore’s experts be looking further back than 130 years? After all, the Little Ice Age took place between 1300 and 1850, following the Medieval Warm Period of roughly 800-1300.
To take Blakemore’s own argument, if the weather of a week doesn’t constitute climate for a year, and weather for a year doesn’t constitute climate for a decade, can we really extrapolate anything from 130 years out of all the years the planet has existed?
But that’s the kind of question that gets you silenced at a UN press conference. Blakemore’s story was accompanied by video of an equally one-sided interview of Stanford’s Steve Schneider, one of the high-priests of global warming.
Schneider recently made news at the Dec. 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen when he refused to answer Irish journalist Phelim McAleer’s questions about the “ClimateGate” scandal and his staff had armed UN security personnel strong-arm McAleer into silence.
“Individual hot years don’t prove global warming,” Schneider told Blakemore. “Individual cold years don’t disprove it. We look for accumulated preponderance of evidence. It’s there. It’s very clear.”
Hopefully it’s a bit clearer than it was in 1978, when Schneider appeared on TV to warn Americans of an impending ice age that, according to the program, “could come sooner than anyone had expected.”
And just in case people aren’t listening to their 5th graders, Blakemore’s video included a helpful analogy accompanied by footage of someone using crayons to draw a listing ship.
Nobody is happier to oblige than ABC News. On Jan. 8, “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer and weatherman Sam Champion worried that the cold weather engulfing much of the world just may be the result of climate change.
Then there’s ABC’s Bill Blakemore. The title of his Jan. 8 ABC News.com article – which could only be a mislabeled op-ed – pretty much summed up his take: “No, the Cold Doesn’t Mean No Global Warming.”
“This is, of course, an old story,” wrote Blakemore, “ ... and more and more 5th graders are bringing it home from their science classes to get their parents up to date on the latest climate science.”
Those properly indoctrinated young folk know three things that stupid, skeptical adults don’t: “Weather is not climate;” “Manmade global warming means less frequent cold snaps (not none at all) and more frequent heat waves;” and there are “record high temperatures this week in Washington State, Alaska and Bulgaria in the Northern Hemisphere,” and in New Zealand and Australia.
Blakemore went on to cite six sources (two of them journalists) that all agreed that just because it is cold doesn’t mean the planet isn’t warming. Weather, they said, is “chaotic.”
Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Blakemore, “Weather dominates on a day-to-day basis, and there will be warmer periods and cooler periods. But it's the overall pattern that gives you the climate.”
Blakemore elaborated, for the benefit of those us not fortunate enough to be enrolled in a grade school science class, on the time frame that constitutes “the overall pattern.”
“Climate is long-term and regional (or bigger),” he wrote, referring to a climate chart covering the last 130 years. Year to year climate fluctuates, but the decadal average is it the important thing.
But if “long-term and regional” are what determines climate, shouldn’t Blakemore’s experts be looking further back than 130 years? After all, the Little Ice Age took place between 1300 and 1850, following the Medieval Warm Period of roughly 800-1300.
To take Blakemore’s own argument, if the weather of a week doesn’t constitute climate for a year, and weather for a year doesn’t constitute climate for a decade, can we really extrapolate anything from 130 years out of all the years the planet has existed?
But that’s the kind of question that gets you silenced at a UN press conference. Blakemore’s story was accompanied by video of an equally one-sided interview of Stanford’s Steve Schneider, one of the high-priests of global warming.
Schneider recently made news at the Dec. 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen when he refused to answer Irish journalist Phelim McAleer’s questions about the “ClimateGate” scandal and his staff had armed UN security personnel strong-arm McAleer into silence.
“Individual hot years don’t prove global warming,” Schneider told Blakemore. “Individual cold years don’t disprove it. We look for accumulated preponderance of evidence. It’s there. It’s very clear.”
Hopefully it’s a bit clearer than it was in 1978, when Schneider appeared on TV to warn Americans of an impending ice age that, according to the program, “could come sooner than anyone had expected.”
And just in case people aren’t listening to their 5th graders, Blakemore’s video included a helpful analogy accompanied by footage of someone using crayons to draw a listing ship.
The idea that these latest up-and-down zig-zags mean human-induced global warming has stopped is described by many scientists in a way that make it sound like a mistake that might be made by someone on the back deck of the tipping Titanic noticing that the tipping has stopped for a moment, saying ‘Oh good, I guess maybe it’s no longer sinking.” But the officers of the ship, who had been down into the front hold of the Titanic, knew that it was still filling with water (just as the atmosphere is still filling up with green house gases), and knew very well that a pause in the tipping was just a momentary effect, with worse to come.
Got that? The science is settled. At least that’s what Blakemore and a number of other journalists want you to think.
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