Ten days after hinting the Earth could end up roasting at a toasty
900 degrees Fahrenheit like the planet Venus, The Washington Post
reported on a new study which finds that the more extreme estimates
of global warming that have been hyped in the media are unlikely to
manifest.
In the
April 10 Post,
staff writer Guy Gugliotta dramatically said the second rock from
the sun is apparently condemned to an eternal cycle of global
warming, but that Venus may have been the gentle, tropical
paradise that Earthlings once imagined a long time ago before a
berserk greenhouse effect boiled away the water.
While Gugliottas report centered on a scientific probe of Venus,
not the study of global warming on Earth, his alarmist language fits
into a pattern the Business & Media Institute observed in
March
of the medias coverage of climate change.
But a new study published in the journal Science downplays the
sky-is-melting alarmism of other scientists.
In the April 20 Washington Post, staff
writer
Rick Weiss
documented a study from a group of scientists led by Duke
climatologist Gabriele Hegerl who anticipate increased global
warming, but not, as Hegerl put it, the largest and most
devastating consequences that other scientists have predicted.
The new work, wrote Weiss, extends a difficult line of research
that uses historical climate data and computer models to predict
warming patterns based on carbon dioxide output. Weiss noted that
the study reaches back 700 years and accounts for sun-blocking
volcanic eruptions among other things.
The bottom line, Weiss wrote: theres only a 5 percent chance that
global average temperatures will rise more than 11 degrees
Fahrenheit in the next century.
Post Reports Global Warming Wont Be As Devastating As Predicted
suggested reading