Media Mayhem: Top 5 tall tales by climate change deniers in 2009

This is just the beginning. Media columnist Ken Edelstein wants your help in coming up with five more.

By Ken EdelsteinMon, Dec 28 2009 at 10:50 AM EST

BOGEYMAN?: Many critics claim Al Gore is saving the planet to fatten his wallet. (Photo: Zuma Press)

It was a banner year for myth making about climate change. Despite mounting evidence that temperatures are rising, the deniers’ camp spun bigger, better and more believable tall tales than ever before.

And those stories worked like a charm in 2009. Amplified by broadcast bloviators and a compliant mainstream media, advocates for burying our collective head in the sand convinced millions of Americans that climate change isn’t happening, isn’t caused by people, or wouldn’t be such a bad thing anyway.

Here are five of the top 10 tall tales in the 2009 climate change denier’s storybook. I want your help with the rest of the list for next week’s column. Let me know in the comments section which ones I’m missing.

Temperatures have dropped over the last decade.

Tall tale: Yellow journalist Matt Drudge peddled this whopper with sensational headlines in 2008. This year, it was repeated so many times that it turned into the kind of contrarian cocktail party factoid that can’t be disputed by mere ... facts. The premise is simple: Draw a line from a particularly hot thermometer level (in this case, the one-time record hot year of 1998) to any lower temperature that came later. Voila! You’ve got a downward trend!

I don’t think so: The cooling myth has been debunked so many times, and so easily, that it’s painful. You don’t have to be a climatologist to understand that temperatures rise and fall all year, every year; a climbing trend can include steps down. Trends can best be identified by looking at moving averages. For example, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency readings show that the five-year averages for global temperatures have risen by more than half-a-degree Celsius since 1980. And before the denialists reading this declare NOAA to be part of a conspiracy, consider that the tall tale relies on the same data in the first place.

In October, the cooling myth was debunked by an Associated Press article in which the writer presented the data to four statisticians without telling them what it was about. Each concluded the cooling interpretation bogus. On Dec. 8, the World Meteorological Organization reported that this decade has been the warmest on record, which would have been difficult if temperatures had been cooling.

Media spin: To their credit, few national mainstream journalists swallowed the global cooling story whole. But the frenzy it generated on conservative blogs and airwaves was so pervasive that “cooling” has risen to the level of unassailable fact for a large portion of the population. Reflexive “truthiness,” stated confidently enough and said often enough, sticks around.

Fox News was particularly nonchalant about repeating the falsehood. Anchor Brett Baier announced in May “a number of studies now [show] there has been no global warming over at least the last 10 years, and that the Earth is actually cooling now.” He never cited those studies.

Then, there’s this sampling of righteous indignation from Glenn Beck:

Has the cooling story been doused enough to snuff it out. I doubt it. Temperature trends are so fundamental to the climate debate that they’re likely to come up every time there’s an unseasonable cold spell. It’s happened before. Earlier this decade columnist George Will was among those propagating a separate cooling myth based on his misinterpretation of temperature data from the 1970s. Then, this year, he was among those falsely claiming that the World Meteorological Organization backed up the cooling myth. Don’t be surprised if Will, Beck and all the rest of them come back with another variant of the cooling story in 2010.

Al Gore’s pushing the climate change myth so he can get rich.

Tall tale: Gore’s political enemies often gripe that he’s made a lot of money since losing the 2000 selection. They’re convinced not only that those were ill-gotten gains, but that the main reason he’s pushing now for climate legislation is so that he can make even more money on carbon credits, or green energy technology, or both, or something. The suspicions reached their apex in a congressional committee hearing when a backbench Republican from Gore’s home state of Tennessee interrogated him on his investments.

While Gore and his defenders argue that the former vice president simply is putting his money where his mouth is, leading climate change denier Steven Milloy stated the objection pithily in Human Events: “It is probably more accurate to say that he is putting his mouth where his money is.”

I don’t think so: The most obvious problem with the Gore’s-getting-rich complaint is that he’s allowed to do that. I mean we do still live in a capitalist country, don’t we? Vice presidents tend to be well-connected. Gore’s better positioned than most, partly because he earns $100,000 speaking fees and partly because he’s made some very good investments since leaving office.

But tying Gore’s wealth to investments that haven’t even happened yet seems more of an effort to appeal to class envy rather than to make a coherent argument that the Nobel Peace Prize winner has a devilish plan to take over global commerce.

Then there’s the timeline. Gore has been “mouthing” his concerns about climate change for more than two decades. In the 1980s, he began to develop the talk that became the basis for the movie An Inconvenient Truth. In 1990, I interviewed him after one of those talks from the backseat of a Toyota Tercel and reported then that I was surprised by the passion and detail he brought to the subject. In 1992, Gore’s first book on the climate threat, Earth in the Balance, was published. So when Milloy writes that Gore’s putting “his mouth where his money is,” he’s got it exactly backwards. The commitment on climate change came long before he started making money.

Gore also stresses that a fair chunk of his earnings tied to climate change go toward two non-profits that he’s founded to push for climate change action. The former vice president might quell the suspicions if he publicly released all his financial information. Then again, name me a private citizen who does that, and explain why Gore is the one who ought to.

Media spin: The mainstream media doesn’t seem so concerned about Gore’s money. But for the right-wing media he serves a useful purpose as the deniers’ bogeyman. It’s truly impressive how much vitriol is reserved for the man.

Many climate scientists don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change.

Tall tale: Every time you turn around, there’s another petition supposedly signed by skeptical climate scientists. First there was the list of “500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares,” put together by the anti-climate-action Heartland Institute. Then, there were more than 30,000 scientists who supposedly signed the “Oregon Petition.” And then, just before this month’s Copenhagen climate summit, 141 “Science and Technology Experts well Qualified in Climate Science” signed an open letter to the U.N. secretary-general demanding “convincing evidence” that climate change is occurring.

I don’t think so: Each document is far less than what it purports to be -- at times hilariously so. When contacted in 2008 by DeSmogBlog, dozens of scientists who found themselves on the list of 500 quickly responded with outrage, saying they never gave permission to be listed. One example: “I am horrified to find my name on such a list. I have spent the last 20 years arguing the opposite."

DeSmogBlog found even more wrong with the Oregon Petition. Many of its signers were undergraduate science majors, not scientists. Others didn’t even exist. Only 39 of the 30,000 signers actually turned out to be climatologists -- but even that claim couldn’t be verified. Et cetera. In the more recent list of 141 “well-qualified experts,” “well-qualified” is in the eye of the beholder. A close look reveals that many are scientists in unrelated fields, while others are engineers rather than scientists.

Why do deniers keep coming up with new petitions? Seems to me it’s because every time one petition is thoroughly discredited, the bloggers, broadcasters and political operatives can breathlessly trot out a fresh one that hasn’t been debunked yet.

Numerous petitions by thousands of actual climate scientists have pressed for politicians to take strong action quickly on climate change, but those efforts haven’t drawn nearly the attention of the deniers’ petitions. Neither have credible polls of scientists, including one early this year in which 97 percent of climatologists agreed that “human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures.”

In an entry on “Scientific Opinion on Climate Change,” Wikipedia lists 45 scientific organizations that concur with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assessment that some global warming is likely caused by people. It adds: “no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change.”

Media spin: It’s not surprising anymore that right-wing blogs, industry-funded think tanks, talk radio hosts and Fox News amplify denier-slanted petitions without mentioning their flaws, or that they fail to mention the more credible evidence of the overwhelming consensus of anthropogenic climate change.

But mainstream media organizations have done little to counter the noise machine. The result: A poll this fall by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press cited “a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising.”

It’d be a heck of a lot cheaper to fix things after the fact.

Tall tale: The economist and the journalist who wrote the spectacularly successful Freakonomics published the followup this fall: SuperFreakonomics. It’s filled with all kinds of errors about climate change, among them that the Earth is cooling, and that solar panels and trees make the Earth hotter.

The most entertaining of bit of unsubstantiated conjecture is that, rather than reducing greenhouse gases, it would be more effective and less expensive to suppress climate change through “geo-engineering” -- by pumping vast amounts of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to reflect away heat.

I don’t think so: Authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt market themselves as iconoclasts -- unafraid to attack sacred cows and to push novel solutions. The problem is that they don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to climate change -- a subject upon which there’s no shortage of expert opinion and, for that matter, creative thinking.

In a post on a science blog, geophysicist Raymond T. Pierrehumbert pretty convincingly accuses Levitt of “academic malpractice.” Meanwhile, Dubner admitted grudgingly -- and incompletely -- on the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog that he and Levitt misquoted a key source on geoengineering. His mea culpa came across as careful backpedaling. And the miracle cure they suggest for climate change comes across more like one of the predictable ideas you’d see in an old Popular Mechanics magazine than like original thinking.

Media spin: Hell hath no fury like a writer scorned. When I reported last month on Levitt and Dubner’s freaky ideas about climate change, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. They didn’t seem like dishonest deniers to me -- more like they over-reached to make their book more sensational.

Now, I’m not so sure. Maybe the controversy drove Dubner into the denial camp. Here he is peddling his book by participating on the most willfully misleading Fox segment on “Climategate” I’ve seen:

Many news organizations gave Levitt and Dubner the free publicity ride that media darling authors get. But the real story here is that two celebrity authors are using their platform to spread bad information. SuperFreakonomics remains No. 5 on Amazon’s bestsellers’ list. How many people will get most of what they learn about climate change from that book?

Climategate discredited the ‘myth’ of anthropogenic climate change.

Tall tale: E-mails stolen from a British climate research center proved once and for all that an insider gang of climate scientists fudged data showing that the Earth is getting colder. The proof? Two or three missives out of thousands between leading climate scientists. In one, a researcher talks about using the “Nature trick” to “hide the decline”; deniers say that proves scientists were hiding temperature declines from the public for years (see #2, above). In another, a scientist says: "I have been fiddling with the best way to illustrate the stable nature of the medieval warm period.” Hmmm. “Fiddling.” Sounds suspicious doesn’t it?

I don’t think so: The stolen e-mails are embarrassing. Wouldn’t some of the stuff you wrote to friends and colleagues over the past 13 years look embarrassing? Some seem nasty on a personal level. A few show possible attempt to skirt British open records laws. There’s even a question as to whether pressure placed by at least one e-mailer on scientific journal editors to not publish the work of skeptical scientists went beyond usual competitive world of academia.

All of that obscures the fact that nobody has pointed to anything -- anything -- in any of the e-mails that discredits the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Scientists pointed this out from the very start, and news organizations that belatedly reviewed the actual facts arrived at the same conclusion.

Media spin: The anti-climate-action media filed error-ridden “Climategate” reports loudly and early. One example: columnist George Will, who wrongly stated on ABC’s This Week that, “One of the e-mails said it is a travesty, his word, it is a travesty that we cannot explain the fact that global warming has stopped” and that another scientist said “he wished he could delete, get rid of, the medieval warming period.” ABC hasn’t corrected the errors. Don’t hold your breath.

On “Climategate,” the right-wing media served as a predictable echo chamber; what’s more important is that the mainstream media utterly failed in its duty. Rather than balancing legitimate, authoritative sources with right-wing spin -- as often occurs -- mainstream reporters just opted for the right-wing spin this time.

Now, the spin has become its reality, even down to the name -- “Climategate.” The story morphed from sloppy reporting about the facts into coverage of calls for investigations and talk about the momentum skeptics were feeling on the eve of the Copenhagen talks.

The actual fact that there was no evidence of data manipulation? Boring. Even three weeks after the story broke, in fact, a CBS anchor and reporter bantered about how the e-mails “cast doubt on the very science” behind climate change. As has so often been the case in 2009 when it came to climate change, they were talking about a mythic world where reality didn’t matter as much as a neat story line.

So I want your help with the rest of the list for next week’s column. Let me know in the comments section which ones I’m missing.

Journalist Ken Edelstein writes the Media Mayhem column for the Mother Nature Network. From various coffee shops in Atlanta, he publishes an environmental news site at MyGreenATL.com.

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rozee 11/19/2010 21:03 PM

The thing about all this is that the Sun seems left out of the debate. What do we really know about the Sun and it's cycles? Not much.It's still a mystery. We just haven't been around for long enough to understand Solar cycles, is that correct?

JackSpratt 03/31/2010 09:39 AM

As for Arctic ice evidence, who needs science?
Just ask anyone in the merchant marine business about the accesibility of the northwest passage.
The evidence is all around us.

And bottom line, it is basic school science that demonstartes how carbon increase makes for a warmer atmosphere.
And it is not disputed that burning fossil fuels releases carbon into the atmosphere.

It's a no-brainer. Climate Change is here, we cause it.

Jackspratt 03/31/2010 07:57 AM

Any mountaineer will tell you that routes long established are changing as the ice melts.
Glaciers are on the retreat, the Arctic is getting thinner, the Antartic ice shelves are breaking up. Southern species are heading north (or vice versa in the southern hemisphere)
How much evidence does anyone need to know the world is getting warmer? You don't need a scientist, just a pair of eyes and a brain.

Guest 02/12/2010 13:59 PM

"and the Rest of the Story . . ."

Ernest Abe 12/29/2009 04:13 AM

Krakatoa Volcano or even more recently, Mt. St. Helens & others in S. America and around the Pacific rim.....how much carbon and ash were released and will be released from future eruptions?

In 2008, Northern California's Sacramento Valley was filled with smoke from forest fires....What I found particularly interesting is that according to reports from the newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, the smoke filling the Valley and even the Lake Tahoe basin, were a normal occurrence during the.... More

Jay Alt 02/12/2010 14:16 PM

- that is a contender for the 'misinformation / duh we don't know anything' category:

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/index.php

Carbon dioxide (CO2)
"Volcanoes release more than 130 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year."

which is about 100 times less than the amount humans are known to burn.

Chas 12/27/2009 22:55 PM

(Re: Global Warming) "I would hope that it would get very hot now, and decrease the surplus population." Ebenezer Scrooge - 1843

(Re: Global Warming) "Especially astonishing are the very short times needed for major warmings. A temperature increase of 5°C can occur in a few decades." - Greenland Ice Core Project-An ESF Research Programme-Final Report

seeker401 12/25/2009 16:16 PM

wow mr edelstein..you took the bait and hook in your mouth..

CRU destroyed all the old raw data..admitted
CRU fudged numbers they gave to the IPCC..evident in the emails and also why the head of CRU has stood down
NASA will not release their figures for perusal despite years of FOI submissions
we know in the mid 70s the same university(east anglia) was preaching the ice age was coming..the same u niversity who now ays its warming!!..i have seen the orignal.... More

Jay Alt 02/12/2010 14:31 PM

- simple simon met a pieman going to the fair -
CRU threw away some copies in the 80s. CRU isn't a weather service and they don't record their own observations. So they copied many weather station results from around the world. The weather services of those countires have the original would the data. (unless they too are involved in the, shudder, 'awful conspiracy' )

Freedomisgood 12/24/2009 17:34 PM

Article From My local paper! Quote AP all you like! LOL
by Don Surber

The Associated Press found a lake that did not freeze early this year and used it as proof of global warming.

Nowhere in the story did it mention the unseasonable cold and snow in Europe, the Midwest and the Eastern seaboard; the White House was under two feet of snow on Saturday.

No, upstate New York is having a mild winter so this automatically proves global warming.

Post Climategate —.... More

Freedomisgood 12/24/2009 17:00 PM

This is what I have been trying to say about Climategate, There are so much money being spent, science in general suffers! Other sections of science is at risk! Here is an article from mackinac,org:

Science is in trouble. The process of scientific discovery is too often being traded for the practice of political science. The recent "Climate Gate" scandal is just a symptom of a much larger problem. When scientists at Britain's Climate Research Unit refuse to release climate data and.... More

JG 12/24/2009 14:46 PM

AGW is a gigantic claim and therfore requires gigantic PROOF before you should commit to it. Since that proof is either missing or rigged, the default position should always be: DON"T BELIEVE IT. If I tell you I have a billion dollars in my pocket you wouldn't believe it until you saw it. Yet the sheeple believe blindly in AWG, and then call everyone else "deniers". How about a little rational and scientific thinking people!?! Rejecting a claim should always be the DEFAULT position absent solid.... More

Freedomisgood 12/24/2009 13:29 PM

Dr. Vincent Gray, has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from The University of Cambridge. He has published more than 100 scientific papers and wrote The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of Climate Change 2001.

He has called the IPCC (United Nations) process a “swindle.”

Gray is one of the “2,500 top scientists” from around the world that the IPCC cites as backing their reports. He wrote 1,900 comments on the final draft on a recent IPCC’s report.

“Right from the.... More

Bipartison 12/24/2009 11:07 AM

The first indicator that someone is dead wrong in this debate is that a person's view on this subject is largely related to the political party they side with. To find out who's slinging crap all you have to do is go to the evidence. In this circumstance I'm going to side with the party that believes that based on current evidence the earth has been around for more than 5,000 years. The religious right will have you believe either all the worlds archaeologists are dead wrong. Or that dinosaurs.... More

DaleC 12/28/2009 15:39 PM

The Religious Right ( aka Fundamentalist Christians) don't believe that "These are the same people that will assure you that nobody will launce nukes from Pakistan or any other Arab nation at Israel. Simply because it's not in the Bible. Therefore it can't happen. If Israel were blown up then the second comming would not happen."

Ever heard of Armageddon? It is in the Bible, Book of Revelations. I live among the people of which you speak and almost ALL of them fear a nuclear armed Iran.... More

Freedomisgood 12/24/2009 13:19 PM

If you are referring to me, I am a Independent for your information. Second I voted for Obama and donated to his campaign!(now i wish i did not!) I do not know one person who has those views, Maybe I am in the wrong part of the world I do not know? The problem with science is that it is never solid, Ideas change the same with the climate. I do agree we need to move toward renewables,but by spending all this money on science that we know changes we need to try to help the human factors. .... More

Douglas 12/24/2009 10:28 AM

After all the comments which hold the leaked emails to be the smoking gun, no-one actually points to the particular bullet. Even Dr. Lindzers article in the WSJ doesn't deal with the actual contents of these emails (he only names it a scandal).

As pointed out (unintentionally ironically) by an earlier commenter, merely repeating something you want to be true does not make it so. The so-called skeptics for the most part are as dogma driven as the proponents who repeat uncritically.... More

Freedomisgood 12/24/2009 16:11 PM

Douglass, can you read? You sure did not read my previous posts! My first post toward the bottom of the page , is this good enough instructions for you?
"The emails alone do not disprove anything, but it does shed light on the deceptive practices! Practices like denying FIO requests, trying to get other scientist fired that did not fit there political Agenda! They also have got credible scientist to take note questioning there data and conclusions! More importantly is the Computer.... More

Vern Goehring 12/24/2009 09:57 AM

Here are some of the ones I have heard:
1. God would never let a great catastrophe happen to the earth.
2. Past warming cycles were before industrialization so this must be mother nature at work. That is like saying drunk drivers do not cause accidents. Everyone knows that icy roads cause accidents and there must be only one cause of accidents.
3. The ice caps are not shrinking.
4. There has been warming on Mars and Venus, and no one is burning fuels there.

DaleC 12/28/2009 15:48 PM

Regarding point 1. If a person believes strongly enough in "God" (aka Yahweh, God of Abraham, Christ's Pop, etc) they also believe in The Great Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Plagues on Egypt etc. Therefore they not only belive it could happen, many of them EXPECT it to happen.

Point 2 - Bad analogy - we have clear and undeniable evidence that, in addition to icy roads, drunk drivers kill people. We know that because they kill people on summer roads. there is not one traffic expert.... More

Ken Edelstein 12/25/2009 13:26 PM

Thanks for the list. I'd never heard the Mars and Venus one. That's good! I also like your analogy in #2.

Freedomisgood 12/24/2009 13:03 PM

December 7, 2009"In November, the average rate of Arctic sea ice growth slightly exceeded the 1979 to 2000 average growth rate for the month".NSIDC scientists provide Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis, with partial support from NASA.
So the sea ice is still melting! It sounds to me that it to has leveled off the same is the earths average temperatures! I wish all the warmers would do just a little research, because I am getting tired of doing it for them!

Jay Alt 02/12/2010 13:24 PM

Sea ice always forms in the fall and winter. The concern is about eliminating the ice cover just as the region is receiving summer sunlight, 24/7. Another variation of this red herring - as news coverage of Arctic melting ramps up, the Antarctic is freezing up. Voila! The 'mystery' of the Austral seasons comforts simple minds with false balance.

Joe 12/24/2009 07:02 AM

Fraud deserves prison. Everyone involved in the global warming hoax deserves a prison term or worse. Socialists and communists, weirdos, and society rejects, all.

W. Holder 12/24/2009 04:48 AM

You clearly have not spent enough time researching this issue. I don't think anyone can deny there has been some regional warming. The question is how serious is this and what is the cause. Anthropogenic Global Warming has turned into a faith or religion and as with all religions, any evidence that this faith is unfounded is met with extreme resistance. Exactly what are we to do when the planet cools a little again as it did during the Little Ice Age a short while ago - release massive.... More

dan 12/24/2009 03:42 AM

Enter your comments here
you make accusations but give no facts to support you position. climate change is real, and natural. it has always occured and always will. before man walked the earth and will continue after we are gone. you have not given me any reason to change my mind

RealTH 12/23/2009 23:45 PM

Consider the post below (source noted). What is needed ids a truly indpepndent review of al non-lost, homogenized and value added data, and the models by a significant, objective group of sckscinetists open to all.

Scientist Points to U.N. ‘Fraud’ on Climate Change
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should be dismissed as an authority on global warming, according to a scientist associated with the IPCC.
In an article that appeared on South.... More

Jay Alt 02/12/2010 13:32 PM

The story originated in a UK tabloid paper. Try searching their websie 'david rose' to so the types of stories that reporter usually covers. Or look at the stories they feature each day . . .

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html

The scientist denies making those statements, to a journalist who's covered the issues for 20 years.

.... More

Freedomisgood 12/23/2009 19:20 PM

As long as total rubbish articles appear like this one I will keep posting the truth! I cannot believe the fact you have a few people with the idea that if you keep repeating the same phrases over and over they will become true! Not only science but common sense tell us this! But comon sense is something the has gone extinct along with the dodo birds!

Freedomisgood 12/23/2009 19:12 PM

Some very prominent members of the American Physical Society are circulating an email asking the Society to withdraw a position statement adopted on 2007 that supported the theory of global warming. It's a powerful statement by leading physicists who are obviously furious about the ClimateGate fraud and about the impact it will have on science. Compare this statement to the cowardly and arrogant editorial in Nature and to the spinning of this transparent fraud by faux pro-science journalists.... More

Jay Alt 02/12/2010 13:36 PM

Fred Singer cannot be considered a prominent phycist. Unless you limit the category to physicists "who've spent their careers slutting for tobacco and fossil fuel companies."

Freedomisgood 12/23/2009 19:08 PM

A independent review by Free Software Magazine.
What many people do not realize is that the CRU and the IPCC have relied heavily on contentious temperature proxies and combined various data sets in even more contentious computer models (the computer that has given us Mann’s deceased Hockey stick graph was the same computer that was used to predict a barbecue summer in the UK this year. It never materialised.) The leaked files make for very interesting reading and new stuff is emerging all.... More

Freedomisgood 12/23/2009 19:02 PM

The emails alone do not disprove anything, but it does shed light on the deceptive practices! Practices like denying FIO requests, trying to get other scientist fired that did not fit there political Agenda! They also have got credible scientist to take note questioning there data and conclusions! More importantly is the Computer Code that was released, I will post a seperate comment for this. Then you have the evidence the polar ice caps are not melting, Russia has come forth to say very.... More

Freedomisgood 12/23/2009 18:19 PM

Roy W. Spencer received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science.... More

Jay Alt 02/12/2010 13:57 PM

Spencer and Christy also got awards form UA-Huntsville - for all that's worth. Their main job was to analyze satellite microwave readings and correlate those with atmospheric temperatures. By the mid-2000s it was shown that they'd done a poor job of that (NASA honors were probably premature). Their measurements of tropospheric temperature trends did not detect warming, but cooling. This did not reconcile with many other evidences of atmospheric warming. When they themselves couldn't (or.... More

Peter 12/23/2009 16:36 PM

You are right to take Deniers with a large pinch of salt. Much like Warmists and Calamitists they do tend to spin the data to support their beliefs.

However, you should pay attention to the sceptics. Examine their facts with an open mind and you will see that AGW theory is complete rubbish.

Dougetit 12/23/2009 15:49 PM

CRU/NASA/NOAA/NCDC use ground/sea based thermometer data which is more susceptible to scientists' manipulation,(as we are finding out through climategate) as well as simple collection errors, (i.e. placement, under or over reporting stations, environment changes etc.)Because of these factors, thermometer data should really can't be "Globaly" considered very accurate. Fortunately, we have Satellite data which, at great expense, began in December 1978, (ironically to investigate global.... More

Media Mayhem: Top 5 tall tales by climate change deniers in 2009

This is just the beginning. Media columnist Ken Edelstein wants your help in coming up with five more.

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Media Mayhem: Top 5 tall tales by climate change deniers in 2009

This is just the beginning. Media columnist Ken Edelstein wants your help in coming up with five more.

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