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Friday, May 4, 2012

PBS' Newshour puts radical lying Heartland Institute climate change denier, James Taylor, on a segment for "balance"



Readers, this is the Heartland Institute's touting of James Taylor's appearance on the PBS Newshour -- note that everything he said was a lie. In the Heartland blog post below, you can also read more lies about climate change.  Headvise recommended.



Heartland’s James M. Taylor Talking Climate on PBS Newshour


by Jim Lakely, "Somewhat Reasonable" blog, Heartland Institute, May 2, 2012
Heartland Senior Fellow for Environment Policy James M. Taylor was interviewed for part of a story on PBS Newshour last night about the teaching of climate change in Americas’s public schools. It was biased heavily toward the views of climate alarmists, which was hardly a surprise. But since The Heartland Institute has been gaining attention for our plans to craft climate curriculum, the PBS producers reached out to us for “balance.”
Below are James’ quick thoughts on the piece, and the video of the story. These folks really need to attend Heartland’s Seventh International Conference on Climate Change (and so should you!). The idea that sound climate science backs up the alarmist narrative is a stubborn myth.
Skepticism is essential to science itself. It is deeply disturbing that many public school teachers bemoan such skepticism in their students rather than celebrate such intuitive adherence to scientific principles.
The heart of the alleged global warming crisis is predictions of future warming from computer models that have consistently predicted too much warming in the past. Importantly, scientific data have shown that the two most important assumptions of such computer models – that modest warming due to carbon dioxide will be substantially exacerbated by changes in cloud formation and atmospheric humidity – are not occurring in the real world.
When real-world data and evidence contradict a scientific theory, the proper scientific response is to proceed with caution rather than vilify those who present the real-world data and evidence.
All that would have been nice to see in this PBS Newshour story last night about the teaching of climate change in America’s public schools. Alas,


2 comments:

Bioneer: Tony C. Saladino said...

This segment on PBS was very bad. In addition to propping up the lie that there is no threat to global stability posed by "business as usual", they also misrepresented the methods and underlying motivations of the climate change deniers. we routinely get as much rain in a single storm event as we would "normally" get in several months. Last summer, at our home in green bay, Wisconsin we got nearly half of our average annual rainfall in just two storm events which occurred in the same week, just two days apart.
If we look to the planetary fossil fuel reserves as giant batteries, storing solar energy that fell to Earth millions of years ago, we are extracting all that energy in a few short generations. Even a system as massive as the ecosphere has limits to what it can absorb and dissipate. The destabilization of the atmosphere is a logical consequence of human activities over the past fifty to hundred years. Detailed analysis of the rapid escalation of record-setting storm and climatic events would inform the average fifth-grader more effectively than the ravings of organizations such as the Heartland Institute, the folks who, for religious reasons, are anxious for the end times to solve all of our problems, or the plain old stupid who could not reason their way out of a Wal-Mart store. Pointing a camera at the retarded used to be socially unacceptable, now it seems that it just makes "good tv". I, for one, am shocked and amazed that people who don't know anything about science are allowed to comment on facts that lie outside their frame of reference. We certainly have the right to our own opinions, but we must all defer to facts.
My blogs can be found at Wordpress as Permaculture, ECO-Ethics, Trees and at blogger.com at either The Otherfish Wrap or ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc.
I for one am

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Tenney, but as a communications guy, I don't think it is very effective to repeat all of Heartland's stuff on your blog, even if you begin by saying it's all lies. That's just giving them another platform. Better would be a short post setting out three or four major truths about climate science that Taylor's comments contradict, so that you're repeating things people should remember ...