Is Time Running Out?

Junk Science - the deliberate manipulation of data for the purpose of supporting one's own premise

From IBD:
Posted 3/29/2006

Climate Change: If what Time magazine says about global warming is to be believed, you may not have to renew your subscription. Plague, pestilence and Al Gore can't be far behind.

In this week's cover story, Time blames everything — from "the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry," which recently struck Australia's northeast coast, to "curtains of fire and dust (that) turned the skies of Indonesia orange," to "sections of ice the size of small states (that) calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic" — on man-made global warming.

In fact, the article reads like the script from the apocalyptic movie, "The Day After Tomorrow."
"By Any Measure, Earth Is At . . . The Tipping Point," Time says in a scare headline, adding just below: "The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame."

For the record, none of these statements is true. But at least Time is not alone in an escalating flurry of apocalyptic prophecies.

As rival Newsweek points out, there's a boom in gloom and doom, and most of it is centered on global warming. Besides the Time opus, which is typical of journalism's one-sided treatment of the subject, new books and documentaries abound. Even the Ad Council has gotten into the act, with a multimillion dollar TV propaganda campaign on behalf of unproven science.

Not to be left out, CBS' "60 Minutes" recently trotted out James Hansen, a NASA scientist being hailed as the "world's leading researcher on global warming." In addition to describing his vision of the apocalypse, he had the chutzpah to complain — on prime-time national television — about the Bush administration's "restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public."

Two years ago, Hansen wrote in Scientific American that an "emphasis on extreme scenarios" had been "appropriate" when "the public and decision makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue." Yet the extreme scenarios continue apace.

What "60 Minutes" did not say is that Hansen acted as a consultant to Al Gore's slide-show presentations on global warming earlier this year, that he endorsed John Kerry for president and that he received a $250,000 grant from the charitable foundation headed by Teresa Heinz Kerry. Must have slipped their minds.

It wouldn't be so bad if Hansen were right. But the man credited with beginning the global warming hysteria has been spectacularly wrong in his own predictions. As author Michael Crichton recently noted, Hansen's prediction to a congressional panel in 1988 of a 0.35 degree Celsius rise in temperatures over the next decade turned out to overshoot the actual gain — 0.11 degree — by 219%.

Clearly, such doomsday prophets have an agenda. But do they have the facts? A much publicized study released March 2 by scientists at the University of Colorado said Antarctica is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice each year.

Sounds like a lot, but it's a mere ice cube compared with Antarctica's 7 million cubic miles of glacial ice. And how much would the seas rise when this 36-cubic-mile chunk of ice joined Earth's 320 million cubic miles of ocean? The study says a whopping 0.4 millimeters, or 0.0115 inch, per year.

About 20,000 years ago — slightly before the first SUV — global sea levels were 400 feet lower than they are now. In other words, the seas were rising long before the dreaded Industrial Revolution.

We're also told that the Larsen B ice shelf on the western side of Antarctica is collapsing. Yes, it is warming. But that's been the case for decades. Besides, it comprises just 2% of the continent; the rest of the continent is cooling.

A research team from the University of Missouri recently 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.

In short, don't buy that ocean-front property in Arizona just yet. And be sure to renew your subscription.