The 'Oh, Really?' Factor

From Investor Business Daily:
Posted 11/14/2005

Junk Science:
Has the "fair and balanced" network swallowed the spin on global warming? A Fox News special warns us the sky is falling, the seas are rising and your SUV is causing it all.

On Sunday, Fox News aired a special hosted by reporter Rick Folbaum, "The Heat Is On: The Case Of Global Warming," seriously entertaining the greenie notion that global warming is real, that mankind is the cause and disaster is on its way in the form of melting glaciers and rising seas.

Contrary opinions were conspicuously absent. But at least Folbaum was a tad more subtle than has been Fox's Bill O'Reilly. He was once quoted in a Sept. 26, 2004, profile on CBS' "60 Minutes" as announcing: "Global warming is here. All these idiots that run around and say it isn't here — that's ridiculous."

Yes, global warming is here, just not for the first time. According to S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, "The earth has experienced some 17 ice ages in the last 2 million years. Ice cores, ocean sediment cores and tree rings all show evidence of large and rapid climate changes, even in recorded history, i.e., the last 3,000 years."

After each ice age is a natural warming period. Earth is in one now.

One segment of the Fox special begins with the tease that we are about to take a "disturbing tour of Montana's Glacier National Park" with environmental activists Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Laurie David, both with the National Resources Defense Council.

But we're not told that, according to Cybercast News Service, the special was approved after Kennedy reportedly "dragged" Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes to a lecture by former Vice President Al Gore. The Bangor (Maine) Daily News on Sept. 23 reported Kennedy's comments about having "dragged" Ailes to the lecture.

Gore, author of "Earth In The Balance," recently said: "I don't want to diminish the threat of terrorism at all. It is extremely serious. But on a long-term global basis, global warming is the most serious problem we're facing."

According to a column by Amanda Griscom Little in the November edition of Outside Magazine, Ailes telephoned David to discuss the "one-hour global warming report that this network will air in the fall, thanks in large part to Laurie's badgering."

Yes, the Montana glaciers have receded. So too have the glaciers that once covered much of North America. Melting glaciers in Montana may be bad for tourism but, as environmental scientist Patrick Michaels writes on www.techcentralstation.com, if all the non-polar glaciers in the world were to melt completely, sea level would rise no more than five to seven inches.

We are shown footage of the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula. It is warming and has been for decades. But it comprises just 2% of the continent. And temperature readings averaged over the entire continent show that as a whole it has been cooling for decades.

A research team from the University of Missouri at Columbia analyzed data from the European Space Agency's radar satellites ERS-1 and ERS-2 and calculated that between 1992 and 2003, the East Antarctic ice sheet gained about 45 billion tons of ice, thickening at an average rate of 1.8 centimeters a year.

The earth in fact experienced greater warming between the 10th and 15th centuries, when vineyards flourished in England, predating the Industrial Revolution. When Eric the Red brought settlers to Greenland in 986, the climate supported the Viking way of life based upon cattle, hay, grain and herring for about the next 300 years.

Was it man-made pollution that allowed 300 years of Nordic settlement in Greenland?

We report. You decide.