NBC's Curry Climbs 'Poster-Child' for Climate Change

     ‘Tis the season for global warming alarmism on NBC. It is “green” week after all.

     Just like last year, “Today” hosts have ironically traveled to the “Ends of the Earth,” spewing carbon emissions all the way. (The network said it will “offset” the emissions.) This year, Ann Curry has been reporting from Tanzania, where she was attempting to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.

     In a taped segment for NBC “Nightly News” Nov. 19 Curry presented a dire image of the volcanic glacier and connected its ice loss to climate change – presumably she meant global warming, not global cooling.

     “Mt. Kilimanjaro has become a kind of poster-child for climate change. Eighty-four percent of the ice has disappeared in less than 100 years and by 2020, scientists expect as early as that it could all be gone,” Curry said.

     Curry also cited the “dramatic change” in the amount of ice on the mountain with a photographic comparison: 1980 and 2008.

      But what Curry didn’t tell viewers was that “most scientists who study Kilimanjaro’s glaciers have long been uneasy with the volcano’s poster-child status,” according to Seattle Times science reporter Sandi Doughton.

      Why were those scientists “uneasy?” Because despite its status as an “icon of global warming,” climate scientists like Philip Mote say Kilimanjaro’s melt hasn’t been caused by greenhouse gases “from cars, power plants and factories.”

     “Kilimanjaro is a grossly overused mis-example of the effects of climate change,” Mote told the Seattle Times. Mote co-authored an article in the July/August 2007 edition of “American Scientist” magazine and is not exactly a global warming skeptic. He told the newspaper global warming is the cause of glacial melting around the world – just not Kilimanjaro.

     According to Doughton’s article, the ice loss on the Tanzanian glacier “seems to be driven by two factors: a lack of snowfall and sublimation.”

     The glacier has also been declining for more than a century – “since long before humans began pumping large amounts of carbon dioxide in to the atmosphere” according to Mote.

     Curry has not merely reported on the issue of climate change and global warming; she has become an advocate. In 2007 as “Today” ramped up for its “Ends of the Earth” adventure, Curry declared that the “mission” was to “find evidence of climate change.”

     NBC’s 2008 “Green is Universal” week started on Nov. 16 and will continue through Nov. 22,according to an article in the Nov. 11 issue of PROMO magazine. NBC Universal will be “presenting 150 hours of environmental programming on air and online” during that time period. That will include ad spots from NBC’s on-air talent pushing eco-awareness and segments during the networks’ news coverage.