ABC, once again, tries to have it both ways on global climate change. As Noel Sheppard blogged back in November, Good Morning America hyped heat waves last summer as symptomatic of global warming. When reports came out that October was unusually cool, and the hurricane season was unusually quiet, the same reporter blogged on the ABC News website that "weather is not climate." Are you following this? Weather is climate, then it’s not. Now, with an unusually mild winter, weather is now climate again in the ABC News world.
On Friday’s Good Morning America, Diane Sawyer questioned again whether the mild winter in the eastern half of the United States is a result of global warming. Sawyer started her global warming hype stating, "And [climate change] can make a warm winter even warmer and more repetitively warm as we face the years coming up."
Sawyer then brought in a climate change expert to continue the alarmist discussion. On the fifth day of 2007, there is talk "about this year as the warmest ever" just like this past hurricane season was supposed to be a record one.
Interestingly, of all the major networks, ABC was the only one that hyped global warming today. Could it be to compensate for John Stossel’s anchor post there?
The entire transcript is below.
Diane Sawyer: "What is causing this warm winter? Well, we know what the map says and government scientists say, it is el Nino. We've seen el Nino before. That's the weather pattern that starts with warm water in the Pacific heating up the air which then flows across the U.S. trapping cold air in Canada. But is there more to the story? Is it all on the stove of global warming? Leading climatologists say that's at work. And it can make a warm winter even warmer and more repetitively warm as we face the years coming up. On this bizarre weather we turn now to Jay Gulledge, who is a scientist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. What's the number one most worrying thing to you right now? What is the thing that you're seeing that you haven't seen before?"
Jay Gulledge: "Well, you know, what we're hearing from scientists on a regular basis now, and this is in the last less than five years, is that the changes that, that they've predicted over many previous years are happening a lot sooner than they were expecting. You know, things like net loss of ice from Greenland and the west Antarctic ice sheet. And, we're seeing a lot of changes with what's going on with plants and animals. They're doing, their blooming or their migrations earlier in the spring. Honestly we just hadn't expected things to happen this quickly. So I think I'm most concerned about the fact that things are moving at such a rapid pace."
Sawyer: "Is this the irreversible part of global warming? We had a two degree increase in temperature above the normal last year, talking about this year as the warmest ever. Is this the irreversible begun?"
Gulledge: "Probably, you know, probably not. I mean, there may be some individual factors that are irreversible, but I think the large scale global kinds of changes, like permanent loss of ice from the large ice sheets and things like this probably aren't at the irreversible stage yet."
Sawyer: "First of all, as the plants bloom early, it just a bouquet in January?"
Gulledge: "Well, that, that is nice to have some color in January, but now there, there's probably more going on than that. It's not just a nice balmy winter. You know, plants, particularly say annuals, flowers that bloom once a year if they bloom in January then we get a freeze in January or February, they're, they're gone for the year. That's, that's not a good thing for their normal biology."
Sawyer: "Are you saying, for instance, this winter that mosquitoes, for instance, will not be killed off, beatles, other pests, and, therefore we're going to see a bumper crop come summer?"
Gulledge: "That's possible if we don't get a hard freeze. That's a common thing that can happen, yes."
Sawyer: "Have you seen, insects in numbers, and, I guess in predatory behavior that really scares you?"
Gulledge: "Yeah. There are, there are some serious problems going on with beatles that infest trees, in the western U.S., there are major forest die off in western Canada, western U.S., Alaska, that are happening, in part because these beatles are not being killed by the normally harsh winters in those places."
Sawyer: "Polar bears. At this rate, have we lost them?"
Gulledge: "We don't know yet if we lose the Arctic sea ice which is, which is disappearing at an alarming rate and we just realized this in recent years. If we lose that sea ice, then we do lose the polar bears. They're dependent on that."
