[Vision2020] Times Retracts IPCC Claims

Sat Jun 26 11:40:10 PDT 2010

I recall a Fox News report regarding the East Anglia University Climatic
Research Unit e-mail hack, that featured a quote from and picture of US
Senator Inhofe, mentioning Inhofe labeling global warming a "hoax," as they
with blatant out of context slant, also mentioned the phrase "hide the
decline" in temperature from the hacked CRU e-mails, implying the scientists
involved were hiding evidence against global warming.

This Fox News spot reminded me of the propaganda copy broadcast by Radio
Moscow during the reign of the Soviet Union, when science reporting had to
fit a political agenda.

I wonder how many in the public saw this news spot and believed it
represented credible journalism indicating that indeed global warming is a
hoax, with scientists involved in a widespread conspiracy to fix the data.

Below is a URL to the full report from the British House of Commons Science
and Technology Committee on the East Anglia University Climatic Research
Unit e-mail hack, followed by a URL regarding the very important May 2010
reports on climate change from the National Academy of Sciences.

The conclusions of various investigations regarding the CRU e-mail hack,
that have found no evidence of a widespread conspiracy to misrepresent
climate science and the evidence for anthropogenic climate warming, have
received scant reporting in various media, just as the May 2010 reports on
climate change from the National Academy of Sciences.  These National
Academy of Sciences reports should be headlines in all media.  That they
have received minimal attention, compared to the media feeding frenzy on the
CRU e-mail hack, that implied a widespread conspiracy among climate
scientists, is evidence against the claim by many that the "liberal media"
is hyping the global warming issue to pursue a political or economic agenda:

http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/HC387-IUEAFinalEmbargoedv21.pdf

http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=05192010
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

On 6/25/10, Ron Force <rforce2003 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>  From Newsweek.com:
>
> Newspapers Retract 'Climategate' Claims, but Damage Still Done
> [image: Sharon Begley]
> by Sharon Begley <http://www.newsweek.com/authors/sharon-begley.html>June
> 25, 2010
>   Greg Rico / AP
>
> Vindicated too late? Penn State climatologist Michael Mann
>
> A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its
> boots on, as Mark Twain <http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/23633.html> said
> (or “before the truth gets a chance to put its pants on,” in Winston
> Churchill’s <http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/1350> version), and nowhere has
> that been more true than in "climategate." In that highly orchestrated,
> manufactured scandal, e-mails hacked from computers at the University of
> East Anglia’s climate-research group <http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/> were
> spread around the Web by activists who deny that human activity is altering
> the world’s climate in a dangerous way, and spun so as to suggest that the
> scientists had been lying, cheating, and generally cooking the books.
>
> But not only did British investigators clear<http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/oxburgh> the
> East Anglia scientist at the center of it all, Phil Jones, of scientific
> impropriety and dishonesty in April, an investigation at Penn State
> cleared <http://www.research.psu.edu/orp/Findings_Mann_Inquiry.pdf> PSU
> climatologist Michael Mann<http://www.meteo.psu.edu/%7Emann/Mann/index.html> of
> “falsifying or suppressing data, intending to delete or conceal e-mails and
> information, and misusing privileged or confidential information” in
> February. In perhaps the biggest backpedaling, *The Sunday Times* of
> London, which led the media pack in charging that IPCC reports were full of
> egregious (and probably intentional) errors, retracted its central
> claim—namely, that the IPCC statement that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian
> rainforest could be vulnerable to climate change was “unsubstantiated.” The
> *Times* also admitted that it had totally twisted the remarks of one
> forest expert to make it sound as if he agreed that the IPCC had screwed up,
> when he said no such thing.
>
> It’s worth quoting the retraction at some length:
>
> The article "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim" (News, Jan
> 31) stated that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
> report had included an “unsubstantiated claim” that up to 40% of the Amazon
> rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall. The IPCC had
> referenced the claim to a report prepared for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
> by Andrew Rowell and Peter Moore, whom the article described as “green
> campaigners” with “little scientific expertise.” The article also stated
> that the authors’ research had been based on a scientific paper that dealt
> with the impact of human activity rather than climate change.
>
> In fact, the IPCC’s Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed
> scientific evidence. In the case of the WWF report, the figure . . . was
> based on research by the respected Amazon Environmental Research Institute
> (IPAM) which did relate to the impact of climate change. We also understand
> and accept that . . . Dr Moore is an expert in forest management, and
> apologise for any suggestion to the contrary.
>
> The article also quoted criticism of the IPCC’s use of the WWF report by Dr
> Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at the University of Leeds and
> leading specialist in tropical forest ecology. We accept that, in his quoted
> remarks, Dr Lewis was making the general point that both the IPCC and WWF
> should have cited the appropriate peer-reviewed scientific research
> literature. As he made clear to us at the time, including by sending us some
> of the research literature, Dr Lewis does not dispute the scientific basis
> for both the IPCC and the WWF reports’ statements on the potential
> vulnerability of the Amazon rainforest to droughts caused by climate change.
> . . .  A version of our article that had been checked with Dr Lewis
> underwent significant late editing and so did not give a fair or accurate
> account of his views on these points. We apologise for this.
>
> In another retraction you never heard of, a paper in Frankfurt took back<http://www.wissenslogs.de/wblogs/blog/klimalounge/medien-check/2010-04-26/frankfurter-rundschau-klimarat-ipcc-africagate> (apologies;
> the article is available only in German) its reporting that the IPCC had
> erred in its assessment of climate impacts in Africa.
>
> The *Times*'s criticism of the IPCC—*look, its reports are full of
> mistakes and shoddy scholarship!*—was widely picked up at the time it ran,
> and has been an important factor in turning British public opinion<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/23/british-public-belief-climate-poll> sharply
> against the established science of climate change. Don’t expect the recent
> retractions and exonerations to change that. One of the strongest,
> most-repeated findings in the psychology of belief is that once people have
> been told *X,* especially if *X* is shocking, if they are later told, “No,
> we were wrong about *X,*” most people still believe *X*. As Twain and
> Churchill knew, sometimes the truth never catches up with the lie, let alone
> overtakes it. As I wrote<http://www.newsweek.com/2009/08/24/lies-of-mass-destruction.html> last
> summer in a story about why people believe lies even when they’re later told
> the truth, sometimes people’s mental processes simply go off the rails.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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