The always funny and thought-provoking Mark Fiore has a great take on the "hoax" of global warming.I was at a party a few weeks ago and brought up the Al Gore documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," and was stunned when a friend said that he believed that the verdict was still out on global warming.
After the party we exchanged some emails, and he sent me this "interesting" article. It's pretty typical of the petro-propaganda that we've come to expect from the Bush administration.
The article quotes Roger Pielke as an expert on climate issues. It didn't take long for me to find testimony he gave to the US Senate back in 2002, in which he claimed that impacts from climate have more to do with "the increasing vulnerability of human and environmental systems to climate variability and change, not changes in climate per se." Think about that for a minute, so it sinks in.
He goes on to posit that "adaptation to climate" should be as important as energy policy, and that "changes in energy policy are insufficient to address the primary reasons underlying trends in the societal impacts of weather and climate."
The article my friend sent me attempts to elevate Pielke by citing Ian Murray as a character reference. Murray is "a senior fellow specializing in global climate change and environmental science at the free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute." The Center for Media & Democracy says that CEI "postures as an advocate of 'sound science' in the development of public policy. In fact, it is an ideologically-driven, well-funded front for corporations opposed to safety and environmental regulations that affect the way they do business."
Murray anticipates any criticism of himself or Pielke by stating, "These days, people get bashed over the head with the idea that there is a consensus, and anybody who speaks out against the so-called consensus is a contrarian or a tool of the oil industry or an otherwise morally suspect person."
Yeah, that's precisely what I was thinking.
As for crosswalk.com, the source my friend sent, and the original source of the story, cnsnews.com, I had never heard of the former and the latter was supposedly created to combat the so-called "liberal media."
