Tuesday, January 30, 2007

RIGHT WING IDEOLOGICAL ATTACKS
ON GLOBAL WARMING SCIENCE


From the Huffington Post courtesy of AlterNet:

Fox Takes Fair And Balanced Look
At Weather "War"...With One Side


FNC's "Fox & Friends" host Steve Doocey did a piece on the "War over the Weather" this morning in advance of Friday's United Nations report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with guest Sen. James Inhofe, ranking minority member on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (and formerly its highly underqualified chair), so Inhofe could once again hold forth on his views on climate change and global warming, namely, that it's entirely normal and natural and not at all a man-based problem and anyone who suggests otherwise is a nefarious tool of the radical left. For his part, Doocey offered leading questions which also called out the "left wing", creating a segment that was actually not at all unlike an informercial.

Click here for video.

And from AlterNet:

Bush appointee unable to utter the words "Global Warming"

This first video details the hysterical-yet-sad story of John Negroponte, back when he was Bush's Director of National Intelligence, attempting to avoid the wrath of the White House by mentioning the words "Global" and "Warming" back to back.

Apparently, it was something of a game to get him to say them in the same sentence...


Click here for video.

I'm thinking that the reason Negroponte was unable to say "global warming" is because the White House prefers their term, "climate change," because they think it sounds less sinister. At any rate, such semantic games, and the Fox propaganda piece (aren't they all propaganda pieces over at Fox?) are simply minor manifestations of what appears to be an all-out attack on the science behind global warming. And this isn't simply harsh and misleading rhetoric: a second video in the AlterNet post shows Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman interviewing a government scientist whose reports on global warming weren't simply censored; rather they were rewritten to mean the opposite of what they originally said, that global warming is real, imminent, and man made.

You know, if there really is controversy about the subject among scientists, which isn't the case but conservatives assert it anyway, then why not let the scientists duke it out among themselves? Why does this supposedly unresolved scientific issue need to be addressed by politicians at all? I'm not certain of the answers to those questions, but I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that global warming is in reality uncontroversial among most climatologists, and right-wingers, scared as hell that reality is going to force them to lose money, are heavily engaged in wishful thinking.

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