Newsweek magazine has no doubt about what is and isn’t causing global warming.
In a Cosmo style quiz, the July 9 issue asked readers: “Which of these is not causing global warming today? A) Sport Utility Vehicles B) Rice Fields C) Increased Solar Output.”
The answer, according to co-authors Sharon Begley and Andrew Murr is increased solar output – and laid most of the blame on humans.
“Extremely warm summers, such as the 2003 European heat wave that killed thousands of people? A human fingerprint. Glacial retreat? Ditto, though it is partly natural. Stronger tropical storms, such as Katrina? Possibly our fault, though on this one the evidence is murkier. Heavy precipitation that alternates with dry spells, so that when it rains it pours? That also conforms to models of man-made climate change,” wrote Newsweek.
Begley and Murr supported those conclusions with “unequivocal” evidence of warming and “90 percent certainty” of human causation as the February 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report said.
But Newsweek left readers without an opposing view, including five scientists to support its position, but not a single voice of dissent. The magazine also did not question the IPCC report.
But dissenting perspectives of the IPCC report and man-caused global warming theories do exist.
One advisor to the IPCC Kevin Trenberth recently admitted that General Circulation Modules, the computer models the IPCC used in its February report, cannot predict future climate and claims the IPCC is not in the business of climate prediction.
Others dispute man’s affect on receding glaciers, tropical storms and several weather.
Even the radical environmental group Greenpeace stated that some glaciers have been retreating since 1850, long before SUVs existed. Left-leaning Chad Myers, CNN’s Severe Weather expert, said severe hurricanes were a result of natural cycles, not global warming in a May 23 segment.
Scientist Tzahy Vaksman, an aviation meteorologist, told the Jerusalem Post that we’ll only know if severe weather is caused by global warming after 20 more years of research.
And the father of scientific climatology, Reid Bryson a professor emeritus at the
“[T]here is no credible evidence that [warming] is due to mankind and carbon dioxide. We've been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years. We have not been making very much carbon dioxide for 300 years. It's been warming up for a long time,” he told The Capital Times of Madison, Wisc.
But you would never know there was a single dissenting view from reading the Newsweek story.
The magazine isn’t the only media outlet that has embraced an attitude of “The earth is warming, it’s mankind’s fault and no one can question it.” ABC, CBS and NBC all treated the IPCC report with that same perspective.
