The Washington Post apparently ran out of space on page 2A May 28, because its global warming scare story didn’t have room for any view other than climate change as a manmade catastrophe.
Juliet Eilperin’s prominently placed article, “Report Details Effects of Climate Change Across U.S.,” covered a study claiming the effects of climate change will have “serious negative consequences” – but didn’t include a single scientist with an opposing view.
According to Eilperin, the 193-page report “highlights how human-generated carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have already translated into more frequent forest fires, reduced snowpack and increased drought, especially in the West.”
Of course, assuming “human-generated carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels” have already caused catastrophes is a debatable assumption.
Atmospheric scientist Dr. William R. Cotton of the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University disagrees with the notion human activity can cause those types of natural calamities, as pointed out by a 2007 report released by the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
“Climate variability has been with Earth for eons. Greenhouse warming is only one factor affecting climate change. There are many other factors some associated with human activity, many not, and not all processes associated with climate variability have been quantitatively identified,” Cotton said. “Therefore I am skeptical about claims of forecasts of what the climate will be like in say, 5, 10 years or more. I also view claims that a few years of abnormal weather (like intense hurricane landfalls, severe storms and floods, and droughts) to be caused by human activity as abuse of limited scientific knowledge.”
Other threats included in Eilperin’s article included increased insect outbreak and “radical” changes in “the nation’s most valued landscapes.”
The report was produced by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, an organization funded with federal taxpayer dollars that describes itself as a group that “integrates federal research on climate and global change, as sponsored by thirteen federal agencies and overseen by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Council on Environmental Quality, the National Economic Council and the Office of Management and Budget.”
Eilperin’s article quoted four experts warning of threats from manmade climate change in addition to direct citations from the report, but nothing that contradicted it.
Articles like Eilperin’s continue to provide support for legislative efforts to regulate Americans’ energy use in the name of climate change. Though Eilperin’s readers wouldn’t know it, there are plenty of voices saying efforts to curb climate change by restricting carbon emissions won’t amount to much. One of the most prominent efforts, the Lieberman-Warner bill, shows these measures come at a high cost for little effectiveness, according to a report recently released by The Heritage Foundation.
“The Lieberman-Warner legislation promises extraordinary perils for the American economy, should it become law, all for very little change in global temperature ... perhaps even smaller than the .07 of a degree Celsius drop in temperature that many scientists expected from worldwide compliance with the Kyoto climate change accords,” William W. Beach, David Kreutzer, Ben Lieberman and Nick Loris wrote for The Heritage Foundation on May 20.
The costs for such a miniscule impact on the climate can be measured in U.S. income – losses in cumulative gross domestic product of at least $1.7 trillion, which could reach $4.8 trillion by 2030 (in inflation-adjusted dollars); losses of jobs exceeding 500,000 before 2030 and possibly approaching 1 million; and an increase of $467 per household annually in natural gas and electricity costs, according to the report.
