Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah is the latest conservative to mindlessly repeat Marc Morano's bogus statistics regarding funding of global warming opponents vs. proponents. From Farah's Aug. 16 column:
Government and corporations have spent about $50 billion in the last 10 years promoting the hysterical notion that catastrophic, manmade global warming is going to destroy the planet unless we provide Al Gore and his friends with all the power they need to stop it.
On the other hand, real scientists who are even remotely skeptical about these claims are denied positions in academia and grants. By comparison, the climate-change skeptics have spent less than $20 million in those 10 years, according to some estimates.
Farah did attempt to hedge things a bit, throwing in "according to some estimates" though he's citing only one estimate, Morano's. But he embraces Morano's wrongness by claiming that "Government and corporations have spent about $50 billion in the last 10 years." While Morano asserted that "proponents of man-made global warming have been funded to the tune of $50 BILLION in the last decade or so," the source Morano cites in support, Bob Carter, said (without evidence, of course) that it was $50 billion since 1990. That would be 17 years, by the way.
As we've detailed, Morano offers no evidence to back up his claim that "proponents of man-made global warming have been funded to the tune of $50 BILLION," whether it be over 10 or 20 years, and Morano's number of $19 million for "skeptics" is a single statistic -- the amount ExxonMobil has given to conservative organizations over the past two decades -- and not reflective of the total to which skeptics have been funded. Further, that $50 billion amount appears to encompass entire budgets of organizations in which only a small amount of which may have gone to "proponents of man-made global warming," and includes tangental or unrelated numbers such as spending on alternative fuel development.
Farah adds:
As a former editor in chief of daily newspapers, I have an exquisitely refined sense of propriety. I frequently served as a highly paid expert witness on newspaper standards and practices. My job often entailed cutting out biased copy from stories before they ever saw the light of day.
Too bad none of that purported "sense of propriety" is reflected at WND, where it appears nobody's job is to "cut out biased copy from stories before they ever saw the light of day" (as we've repeatedly documented).
