Topic: Media Research Center
Julia Seymour writes in an Oct. 2 MRC Business & Media Institute item:
The UN’s climate panel (IPCC) released its latest warning about "catastrophic" climate change on Sept. 27, garnering the frantic attention of all three broadcast networks that night. CBS even aired a claim about temperatures rising “more than 200 degrees."
Predictably, the evening news shows on ABC, CBS and NBC Sept. 27 repeated the IPCC’s dire warnings without including any skeptics and without mentioning past failures such as their inability to accurately predict warming or sea level rise.
ABC’s “World News with Diane Sawyer,” NBC “Nightly News” and CBS “Evening News” all failed to include criticism of the IPCC with the exception of a swipe against “skeptics” on ABC. NBC continued to link weather events like Hurricane Sandy to climate change while CBS aired a statistic that one scientist called “meaningless.”
With the words “big warning” onscreen, ABC announced the “landmark” report from “top scientists.” Dan Harris went on to mention weather events including “superstorm Sandy,” and ominously warned that the “UN report says we will be seeing much more of these kinds of things in the coming decades as a result of climate change ...” Of course, that’s what the IPCC has been saying for years.
Harris acknowledged the existence of other viewpoints, but immediately tore them down saying, “skeptics have predictably accused the UN panel of being alarmist, but Princeton climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who is on the panel, says this is a major wake up call.” Yet Oppenheimer himself has been accused of activist junk science by other scientists, according to meteorologist Anthony Watts’ website. Harris didn’t happen to mention that.
Seymour didn't mention that these "other viewpoints" are considered fringe within the scientific community. One recent review of 12,000 peer-reviewed abstracts on "global warming" and "global climate change" showed that 97 percent of the papers that took a position on the cause said humans were causing it.
