TODAY'S LETTERS: Readers Still Heated Over Climate Change Column and Katrina Anniversary

By: E&P Staff Readers aren't taking a break just yet over rebuffing Steve Outing's column about Climate Change, while others responded to the Hurricane Katrina anniversary.

***

Re: Coverage of Bush and Graham Greene

It is ironic that veteran groups should be inviting and listening to draft dodging, combat avoiders such as W. Bush and Cheney's gung-ho rhetoric. I quit both.

Steve Block
WW2 USN


Global Warning and 'Chilling'

The title of Steve Outing's web column, "Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers," sent a chilling jolt through me.

Getting over objectivity is a questionable recommendation for newspapers or any other news medium, particulary in this era of web "journalists" and web sites whose "objectivity" and adherence to verified sources and genuine facts is often dubious.

While Outing directed his concept toward a "do-good" crusade, where would "get over objectivity" end? Foreign policy? Space projects? War? If newspaper journalists do not stand as guardians of objectivity, who will? Good, objective reporting has always sent an understandable message to readers.

Editorials and commentary, appropriately labeled as such, allow plenty of flexibility in approaching a subject, but shouldn't "objectivity" remain an untrampled bulwark for good journalists, as I thought it always had in my 50 years associated with both print and broadcast news.

Bob Kimmel
Chairman, Editorial Board
The Hudson Independent
Tarrytown, N.Y.

Your missive about newspapers pushing the Global Warming issue is interesting. Who would have thought that someone in the MSM would advocate pushing an agenda to the public whether the public wants it or not.

Global Warming is real, Human caused Global Warming is bunk. It has not been proved nor is there a consensus except by those who wish to make the US a third world country.

As somebody who has been in the industry for 25 years I find your agenda part of the problem with the Dinosaur Media. Our media outlets do not respect their customers, they do everything they can to insult them and do not care to make changes when said customers complain or revolt by leaving.

The newspaper is not there to push an agenda, it is there to repot the news and let the customer decide for themselves. Until we get back to that ideal, we are on the Dinosaur Media Death Watch.

Karl Weinberg
Port Orange, Fla.


Steve Outing?s column on climate change was one of the most misguided columns on the subject I?ve ever read ? and I?ve read a lot of misguided stuff on this subject over the years.

Outing wrote, ?The few critics of the consensus are a small and shrinking group, who to most observers seem irrelevant. To the mainstream, they may as well be flat-earthers.?

Outing is deeply confused about the subject. Two recent surveys of scientists ? one of 530 climate scientists conducted in 2003 by German scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch and the second conducted in 2006 of members of the National Registry of Environmental Professionals ? shed some light on what scientists really believe.

Most scientists (more than 80 percent) believe some global warming has occurred. The best estimate is that global temperatures have risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit during the past 100 years.

A majority of scientists, but certainly not all, believe the human presence is responsible for some part of the recent warming. Most scientists believe it is not yet possible to determine how much of the modern warming is the result of natural cycles and how much is due to human activities.

The scientific community is split down the middle on whether future warming would be moderate and benign, or severe and harmful. Most scientists don?t believe we can predict what future climates will look like. And there is no agreement at all on what, if anything, we should about global warming.

So where did Outing get the idea that there?s a ?consensus? that the modern warming is man-made and will be catastrophic? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? It claims that its reports represent the views of some 2,000 scientists.

But the great majority of those scientists only comment on or contribute to a few pages of the much larger report. They expressly do not endorse the overall studies or the claims that appear in the ?Summary for Policymakers,? which they do not help write or approve. Many of the scientists who participate in the IPCC process are, in fact, outspoken skeptics of man-made global warming.

There is only one empirical study ever done that appeared to support the claim of a consensus that global warming is man-made. It was produced by Naomi Oreskes, a professor of gender studies at the University of California - San Diego.

Oreskes examined abstracts of 928 articles published from 1993 to 2002 and found ?none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position? that the recent warming of the Earth was due to human activities. Note that she didn?t claim a consensus in support of the idea that warming would be severe or harmful, or even that all of the papers agreed with the consensus position. No survey of the literature or of scientists has ever shown consensus on those claims.

When other researchers tried and failed to replicate Oreskes? findings, she was forced to admit she had mis-identified the search terms used in her study. One scientist, Benny Peiser, reported that his own analysis of the scientific abstracts supposedly studied by Oreskes found only 13 (1 percent) explicitly endorse what she called the ?consensus view? while 470 (42 percent) of the abstracts include the keywords ?global climate change? but do not find or endorse any link to human activities.

On the day I?m writing this, DailyTech.com is reporting that new research by Klaus-Martin Schulte, accepted for publication by the journal Energy and Environment, finds no consensus on global warming in academic journal articles appearing between 2004 and early 2007. Nearly as many articles explicitly refute the theory of man-made global warming as endorse it, while most articles are simply silent on the issue.

In light of all this, Outing?s call on journalists to embrace the false claim of ?consensus? on global warming is spectacularly wrong.


Joseph L. Bast
President
The Heartland Institute
Chicago


Mr. Outing makes two huge factual errors in his column on global warming and the need for news reporting organizations to abandon "objectivity".

Mr. Outing says ?There's clearly scientific consensus that humans are altering the planet's climate?. While there is general agreement that the earth has warmed over the past 150 years there is not ?consensus? that man is responsible.

More than half of recent peer-reviewed articles on GW by climate scientists fail to explicitly endorse that view. See this piece which notes 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." (Note: Science does not and cannot work by consensus. Think Galileo, Copernicus, or Einstein ? all of whom were decidedly out of the consensus yet are the greatest scientists in history.)

He says that ?the effect is accelerating.? Really? Then why has there been NO warming observed at all for the last 8 years according to the global monitoring network? Despite a continued rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere? Already the computer modelers are having to backtrack and claim that global warming will resume again in 2009 ?with a vengeance?? We?ll see, but they are merely proffering a hypothesis, not scientific evidence.

It is more than revealing that 5 of the ten hottest years in U.S. history occurred in the 1930s and only 3 recently ? for a net warming over the past 100 years of only 0.2 degrees C. How a catastrophe can be spun out of such modest warming is beyond me.

Finally, for Mr. Outing to claim that those of us who do believe there is sufficient evidence that the current warming is mostly part of the natural climate cycles that have been recorded in ice cores, sediment cores, tree rings, fossil pollen databases, and other proxies are ?flat earthers? without ANY evidence to corroborate his view other than admittedly flawed computer models owe us an apology. Leave the advocacy to advocates and report the facts as they arise. Otherwise, we might as well hand control of our media to George Bush, Hillary Clinton or some other political operative a la China or Saudi Arabia.

Sincerely,

Alex Avery
Director of Research
Center for Global Food Issues, Hudson Institute
Churchville, Va.



I am amazed at Steve Outing?s piece claiming that newspapers have been avoiding advocacy journalism when it pertains to global warming! He cites the data errors recently reported in many newspapers. The fact is that many newspapers heralded the original conclusions as significant and produced stories and editorials citing 1998 as proof positive that global warming is manmade. When the errors were corrected, the insignificance of the change was highlighted.

Mr. Outing apparently doesn?t have much in the way of understanding of science in general. Scientific consensus is not science, but the application of democratic principles to science. Science requires experimentation and predictability for proof. Both of those concepts require skepticism. As we have already seen, the dire predictions of many scientists and politicians are almost reduced.

A question for Mr. Outing. If all the ice and snow at the north pole melted over a period of one year, how high would the oceans rise? One doesn?t need to know how much ice and snow exist at the north pole in order to come up with the answer!

While visiting the Grossglockner Glacier several years ago, we were told by resident scientists that the glacier had receded far beyond what it had ever been prior to man inhabiting Europe. The next year, we were told by the same scientists that the receded glacier had uncovered gold mines! Ooops!

Back to the question. Since ice and snow displace the same amount of water it contains and there is no land mass at the north pole, the ocean levels wouldn?t change at all. But that is science and not conjecture predicated on a theory that has yet to come up with even one predictable event!

Scientific consensus claimed that stress was the primary cause of ulcers. One doctor thought otherwise and published his findings that a bacteria is frequently the cause. The scientific community called him a crackpot, but his experiments were repeated by others and now ulcers are treated with antibiotics.

Newspapers would do their readers greater service by actually being objective and as the scientific method requires, look at proof and disproof with equal balance. A recent study of all peer reviewed articles on global warming reveals that there is no consensus as to man?s effect on global warming. As the IPCC retreats as to the consequences of global warming, they raise the specter that man has something to do with it. Objective reporting would reveal that the effect man has is either minimal or inconsequential. Instead, newspapers dutifully echo the call for action by Al Gore, whose flawed application of science brings has brought him to savior status!

It would help if journalists actually understood science. I doubt that will happen.

H. Michael Sarkisian
Sacramento, Calif.


How about this for a solution:

Stop printing papers...go all electronic! Have your research department calculate to amount of green house gases wasted on the following: cutting trees, trucking trees to mill, creating pulp, making paper, shipping paper to print plant, manufacturing ink, running presses, distributing papers to stores, going to stores to pick up papers, disposing of paper to garbage, carting papers to land fill.

Please encourage your readers to read your publication, and others, on their computer and the world would be a cooler place!

Marc Wein



'Times-Picayune' Editorial: Mississippi Got Larger Share of Aid

I wonder if it occurred to anybody at the Times-Picayune that the difference in funding might have several reasons:

1. The people in Mississippi rolled up there sleeves and got immediately to work cleaning and rebuilding. Most of the people from Louisiana went straight to blaming people then moved out and are waiting for the government to do all the work so they can move back.

2. Mississippi has used the money given to them to get the work done; Louisiana has many millions in the bank waiting to be spent but is tied up in red tape.

3. Mississippi used what it had available; Louisiana has many levels of contractors and politicians each taking a large bite of the federal money before a small piece is finally paid to the people doing the work.

4. Mississippi may have gotten more federal aid but you did not see Louisiana talking about the disproportionate amount of money donated by citizens around the country they received.

David J Horchak
Houston, Tx