Tuesday June 12, 2001

PRESS MISREPRESENTS NEW GLOBAL WARMING REPORT

WASHINGTON, DC, June 12, 2001 (LSN.ca) - One of 11 scientists who prepared a just released National Academy of Sciences report on climate change, says the media misused the report to promote political action against global warming. MIT Meteorology professor Richard S. Lindzen says the NAS report made clear that "there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them."

Typical of the media reporting was a paragraph in the June 7 CNN news that stated "The study found global warming 'is real and particularly strong within the past 20 years' and said a leading cause is emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. It also said that greenhouse gases are accumulating in the Earth's atmosphere as a result of 'human activities.'"

Lindzen criticizes media outlets which depicted the document "as an implicit endorsement of the Kyoto Protocol," an international environmental treaty which connects reducing energy emissions with controlling global warming. "My own view, consistent with the panel's work, is that the Kyoto Protocol would not result in a substantial reduction in global warming," says Lindzen.

"We are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future," said the professor. "The climate is always changing; change is the norm," he added.

Lindzen called it reprehensible that the NAS and other reports were being used to "disguise uncertainty, and conjure up some scary scenarios for which there is no evidence... [so as] to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens."

http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95000606
http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/06/07/global.warming.ap/index.html

URL: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2001/jun/01061201.html

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