Topic: Newsmax
Only in right-wing politics would a scientific consensus draw anger.
But that's what Newsmax is telling us in the headline of a Sept. 27 article by Lisa Barron: "Anger as UN Claims 95 Certainty on Manmade Global Warming." And by hunting down only climate "skeptics," anger is what Barron finds:
Reaction came thick and fast Friday to the United Nations' latest report on climate change that claimed it is 95 percent certain that global warming is manmade.
Even that figure was slammed as meaningless. "Ninety-five percent doesn't mean anything," David Kreutzer, the Heritage Foundation's Research Fellow in Energy, Economics, and Climate Change told Newsmax. "It's not a scientific term.
House Energy Committee member Michael Burgess said he viewed the report "very skeptically." In an interview with Newsmax TV, the Texan said, "The current data from the very recent past does not support the previous prefaced proposition that it was getting worse and worse from 2009 onward."
Only in right-wing politics would 95 percent certainty be considered meaningless. (Unless you're going after terrorists, in which case one percent is sufficient.)
Barron also claimed that "The UN report also failed to explain why temperatures have stayed basically steady since 1998." In fact, as Media Matters notes, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change report did address the issue of temperatures plateauing over the past 15 years, calling it a short-term trend that does "not in general reflect long-term climate trends."
Barron devotes a significant portion of her article to a group called the Nongovernment International Panel on Climate Change, which she benignly describes as "a group of independent scientists and scholars from 15 countries." In fact, unlike the IPCC report, the skeptic-dominated NIPCC report was compiled by paid contributors and did not go through rigorous peer review. Barron did not mention that the NIPCC is a joint project of three fossil-fuel-backed groups. Previous editions of NIPCC work have been discredited.
