Vanity Unfair

Julie’s post today included a link to the May ’07 Vanity Fair article focusing on CEI’s own Myron Ebell and the newest supposedly endangered species: the global warming skeptic. There were two elements to this article (apart from the rancorous tone) that I felt warranted a response.

First, there is the unsubstantiated claim, yet again, that “almost no scientist doubts that global warming is here, that man-made greenhouse gases are to blame, or that if we don’t cut back on those gases fairly soon we’ll be in a heap of trouble”

I’ll track back to my own post yesterday, where I linked to a study concluding that:

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers “implicit” endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no “consensus.”

The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the “primary” cause of warming, but it doesn’t require any belief or support for “catastrophic” global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.

The second element of the Vanity Fair article that I take issue with is the common response greenies have when a study comes out that they don’t like (like this one); some of the funding for the study was provided by industry, therefore the conclusions are invalid. But then we are all in the dark because all of science is funded by someone, and just about every organization and agency has some kind of agenda. Many pro-global warming studies are either funded by, or conducted by organizations whose sole purpose is to prove and thwart global warming.