Greenbats

Mark Steyn offers an excellent summary of the Goreacle in his current syndicated article “Doom if Saint Al Loses Carbs.” Some of the excerpted highlights:

• Michael Burton, an English High Court judge and apparently a fine film critic, ruled that Al’s Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth was prone to “alarmism and exaggeration” and identified nine major factual errors.
• The so-called scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests rising sea levels across the next century of somewhere between 15cm and 60cm, with about 30cm being most likely. An Inconvenient Truth insouciantly adds a zero to the worst-case scenario.
• [Gore’s movie] fulfills the same role in the schoolhouses of the guilt-ridden developed world that the Koran does in Pakistani madrassas. Gore’s rise is as remorseless as those sea levels. I assumed Gore’s clammy embrace would do for the environmental movement what his belated endorsement had done for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential candidacy: kill it stone dead.
• No matter how you raise the stakes [. . .], Saint Al of the Ecopalypse can raise them higher. Climate change, he says, is the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced. Ever. And not just humankind, but alienkind, too. “We are,” warns Gore, “altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe“.
• [T]he average US household consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours of electricity. In 2006, the Gores wolfed down nearly 221,000kWh. 221,000kWh? What’s he doing in there? As his spokesperson explained it, his high energy usage derives from his brave calls for low energy usage. He’s burning up all that electricity by sending out faxes every couple of minutes urging you wastrels to use less electricity. Insofar as he’s made any contribution to global peace, it’s in persuading large swaths of a narcissistic Western world to busy itself with non-solutions to pseudo-crises to such a distracting degree that al-Qa’ida may wind up imposing the global caliphate without having to fire a shot.

Read the entire article.

R. J. Samuelson, a Newsweek contributing editor, calls Sharon Begley, Eve Conant and Eleanor Clift’s “Denial Machine” article “Highly contrived.”

Samuelson goes on to put some reality in perspective by pointing out the prohibitive costs of ‘immediate and positive measures’ to control the ‘runaway greenhouse effect.’

The Senate EPW Minority Blog posted an article on Newsweek’s quasi-retraction:

Washington DC – Robert J. Samuelson, a contributing editor of Newsweek, slapped down his own Magazine for what he termed a “highly contrived story” about the global warming “denial machine.” Samuelson, writing in the August 20, 2007 issue of Newsweek, explains that the Magazine used “discredited” allegations in last week’s issue involving a supposed cash bounty to pay skeptics to dispute global warming science and he chided the Magazine for portraying global warming as a “morality tale.” (LINK) Samuelson’s article titled “Greenhouse Simplicities,” also characterized the “deniers” cover story as “fundamentally misleading.”

“Unfortunately, self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism. Last week’s Newsweek cover story on global warming is a sobering reminder,” Samuelson wrote.

Who would have thought that Newsweek would debunk its own embarrassing cover story a week later in the very next issue? This kind of reversal does not happen very often in journalism. [Note: It previously took Newsweek 31 years to admit its 1970’s prediction of dire global cooling was completely wrong. See October 24, 2006 article: Senator Inhofe Credited For Prompting Newsweek Admission of Error on 70’s Predictions of Coming Ice Age – (LINK)]

Speaking of prohibitive costs, NRO’s Planet Gore notes that higher taxes such as those proposed by Greenbat Congressman John Dingell, D – Michigan, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, when he released his plan to fight global warming: a 50 cent gas tax increase and elimination of the mortgage deduction for homes over 3,000 square feet – the average American home is 2,400 sq. ft.

Dingell’s proposal was met by a deafening silence from the climate alarmists, since they know that reckless taxation damages their already weak chances of winning their arguments about climate change.

As for Dingell, he self-righteously wants to pass the costs on to consumers and in typical Democrat fashion, wants to punish success by laying more taxes on people who work hard to succeed. Why, you ask? Because Dingell represents Detroit’s automotive workers and manufacturers, and would rather that you and I pay for cleaning up their act.

Newsweek is a magazine whose name is only half right. They publish each week, but their content? News? Not so much . . .

This time, Newsweek (a part of the far left MSNBC media) published an article proclaiming that those of us who challenge the ‘consensus’ that the planet is doomed, are in fact part of a massive ‘Denial Machine.’ In the article, the authors claim that there is yet another ‘vast conspiracy’ funded by the oil companies and pushed by research groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute. They claim that this ‘machine’ is well-funded, but wait! The promoters of the ‘consensus’ are funded way more than the ‘deniers.’

Senator James Inhofe (R – Okla), on the Senate EPW Minority Blog, points out that Newsweek ignored his statistics on relative funding levels of both sides of the issue:

The only problem is — Newsweek knew better. Reporter Eve Conant, who interviewed Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, was given all the latest data proving conclusively that it is the proponents of man-made global warming fears that enjoy a monumental funding advantage over the skeptics. (A whopping $50 BILLION to a paltry $19 MILLION for skeptics – Yes, that is BILLION to MILLION . . .)

The ‘Planet Gore‘ blog also published some interesting things about this Newsweek article:

Newsweek: “The Denial Machine”. Newsweek tries to marginalize global warming opposition by coining the phrase “the denial machine” in this week’s issue.

Newsweek Clueless: How the Tail Wagged the Dog. Newsweek’s cover story, by Sharon Begley and three colleagues, purports to be an expose of the global-warming “denial machine” and how it keeps America Kyoto-free.

More on Newsweek Cover Story. Marlo and Henry have commented well on the Newsweek cover story, and especially the lead item referring to the crazy story out a few months ago involving me and AEI in supposedly trying to “bribe” scientists to undermine the IPCC.

This is the same Newsweek magazine that predicted an ice age was coming in the 1970’s. Can anyone doubt the left-wing agenda of publishers like Newsweek?