Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Friday, February 02, 2007

I Ain't Gonna Spread for No Carbon

The way climate change is covered in the news reminds me of that 'Tammy' song from Kids in the Hall: "Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. ... Perhaps!"

But maybe that'll change now that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released a report stating that there's more than enough evidence on the 'perhaps' side to consider it a 'yes', despite being cautious:

The report and the scientists who wrote it called the document conservative. It used only peer reviewed published science and was edited by representatives of 113 governments that also had to agree to every word, including those opposed to measures like the Koyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

This made me think back to the Metro review (no longer online) of An Inconvenient Truth by stodgy ideological fashion victim, Rick McGinnis (pictured, left):

It would require much more space than a movie review to consider Gore's science. He claims a universal consensus of scientists on manmade climate change that doesn't exist (claim disputed here by an actual climate scientist), and relies on questionable anecdotes to illustrate its effects, such as the one about polar bears drowning as they lose their ice floe habitats -- and illustrates it with a cloying cartoon. The lynchpin of his lecture is a graph that shows the earth's temperature rising exponentially with the levels of greenhouse gases; even if this now-famous graphic weren't in dispute, he neglects to mention that levels of atmospheric hydrogen have tended to echo temperature, not the other way around.

The thing is, I bet Rick didn't receive a dime from the petrochemical industry to write that. I don't mind a deliberately obscufacating right-wing idealogue; I object to a cut-rate one.

7:35 PM , # , |