On Feb. 2, Detroit News Opinion Page Editor Manny Lopez took his favorite whipping boy, Al Gore, to task for Gore’s suggestion that the recent Midwest snowstorm may have been intensified by climate change. He lectured “Goreacle and his lemmings” that the storm had nothing to do with climate, but was “part of that pesky little thing called weather.”
Only two days later, Detroit News cartoonist Henry Payne, who sits on the News’ editorial board with Lopez, wrote that, because of snowfall in Dallas, “global warming” had been “debunked on the grandest stage of all: The Super Bowl.” It was, he wrote, “an embarrassment of Janet Jackson-like proportions” for Gore.
Discerning readers may be puzzled how the News’ braintrust can simultaneously declare both that the snowstorm had no bearing on climate change theory and that it debunks climate change in a most humiliating way. But regular readers of the News’ editorial columnists and bloggers are not surprised.
In a Feb. 3 column, Payne tells us that the only people left supporting climate change theory are "the elites and their crony capitalist backers" who are sucking up taxpayer subsidies for windmills (presumably they, not the poor little coal and oil industries are calling the shots in Washington now), asserts that a cold spell in parts of America has climate change adherents “in a panic” and spins the usual climate conspiracy theory involving thousands of crooked scientists worldwide. Plus, there’s a bonus conspiracy theory! A worldwide coordinated cover up of "the scientific scandal of the century" by the world’s media.
Possibly the frenzy has something to do with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s recent data showing that 2010 tied the warmest year on global record. Or, perhaps someone is angling for an invitation to a guest spot on a Fox News pundit shoutfest. Either way, News readers deserve less hysteria and more level headedness from their opinion leaders.
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Exactly. Anyone who claims that a specific weather event is connected to global warming are mistaken to disingenuous (no matter if they say it is evidence for or against).
ReplyDeleteIt's the trends, of which makes up climate change.
And the predicted trends of a warming world are easily found on climate websites - of which deniers aren't bothered to consult. One of the predicted trends is more precipitation (i.e. snow) in the mid-west part of the country.