Bias and the Lack of Scientific Approach at The Weather Network

A few months ago, I wrote that over the past few years The Weather Network has presented many items about global warming, but has never presented any of the facts or arguments provided by the global warming skeptics. To my knowledge, not even once.

Last week I received an e-mail message from Patrick Carroll, a meteorologist who is also concerned about the biases of The Weather Network. Here is his message, reproduced with his permission:

I came across your blog site while searching for evidence that other people were aware of the bias the Weather Network exhibited towards anything contrary to the prevailing “wisdom” of the IPCC theory of man-made or anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

I was a meteorologist for Environment Canada for 32 years before retiring. As such, the issue of AGW caught my attention a few years ago when Al Gore’s Academy Award winning (and now thoroughly discredited) film, An Inconvenient Truth, appeared. I began to suspect that something was terribly wrong with the underlying premise behind the film when “The Great Global Warming Swindle” appeared on the Internet. Since then, I have armed myself with considerable additional knowledge about what drives the global climate and found abundant evidence that the IPCC is indeed, in the words of former IPCC reviewer Dr. Vincent Gray, “fundamentally corrupt”.

In January of 2007 I sent an e-mail to Deanna Langton of the Weather Network enquiring as to why they were not presenting more balanced discussions on the topic of AGW. I had expected that an organization supposedly comprised mainly of people of scientific training and background would be less likely to favour one side or the other on this contentious topic than the mainstream media. Was I ever mistaken!

I mentioned the frequent appearances of media icon Dr. David Suzuki to the exclusion of anyone from the other side of the issue. She assured me that the Weather Network would give equal consideration to having so-called global warming “skeptics” have their say. I’m still waiting.

I sent another e-mail to the president of the Weather Network in December of 2008 pointing out that they had still not done anything to present a more balanced view on the topic of AGW and listed numerous examples of where the IPCC theory had fallen into disrepute including evidence that global warming had stopped in 1998 and that a cooling trend had begun since 2002 despite rising atmospheric CO2 levels. I never received a reply.

It is indeed unfortunate that Canadians have been grievously misled by a compliant mainstream media and political leaders, who have failed to perform due diligence on anything the IPCC and its supporters have said. The entire issue of AGW has become politicized to the point where those scientists trying to bring attention to the flaws in the IPCC argument have been unfairly vilified and threatened by the Gestapo-like propaganda and tactics of the radical environmental green-shirts. This is not the way that issues of a scientific nature should be discussed and should not be the basis for the formation of government policy on environmental matters.

The IPCC was never interested in determining the true nature of what drives the Earth’s climate, which is why the panel ignored long observed historical relationships between such things as solar cycles and our global climate. The IPCC was only interested in proving that man-made emissions of CO2 were responsible for the global warming of the latter half of the past century. To that extent, the panel used doctored climate statistics and the output of unproven and unreliable computer models to fabricate its alarmist prediction of runaway global warming.

It is only in the past few years that the flawed nature of the panel’s methods has been uncovered to the point where there are now tens of thousands of scientists world-wide who condemn the panel’s theory as seriously flawed. That global temperatures have been cooling since 1998 despite rising atmospheric CO2 levels should be raising questions in the minds of politicians about the validity of the IPCC theory and that attempts to control man-made CO2 would be an exorbitantly costly exercise in climate moderation futility.

The President of Verity Management Services sent the following letter to President Obama warning him that the administration’s plan to tax carbon emissions was a bad idea because there is growing evidence that our sun is entering what he calls a period of “solar hibernation” that would result in major global cooling instead of warming.

http://www.spaceandscience.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/obamapresidentfinalappeal03-2-09.doc

 The effect of the 206-year solar cycle mentioned would take us back to a time of the Dalton Minimum, which was also suggested by geologist David Archibald in his paper on solar cycle 24. Mr. Archibald’s prediction for solar cycle 24 seems to working out far better than that of NASA’s Dr. Hathaway, who failed to predict the sun’s drawn out period of sunspot minimum at the end of cycle 23.

 http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/pastandfuture2.pdf .

 Another interesting study of the 206-year cycle concerns the disappearance of the Mayan civilization:

 http://ess.geology.ufl.edu/hodell/Reprints/pg16-22MAYA1.pdf

 Obviously, global cooling of this magnitude would have a marked effect on agriculture across the temperate zones. Developing grain variants that can resist colder weather and shorter growing seasons takes time, and that time has been wasted working instead on variants that can withstand greater heat and drought, all because non climate scientists were deceived by the IPCC predictions. But that’s what you get when you allow science to be politicized, as Dr. Tim Ball suggests:

 http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/9177

 It is sad that Canadians have been conned by the IPCC, the mainstream media and organizations such as the Weather Network into buying the hoax of AGW. Much money and time has been squandered on attempts to curb, sequester and demonize a harmless atmospheric trace gas that is essential to all life on earth. The public will soon be looking for scapegoats if global cooling continues to manifest itself at a faster rate. They won’t have to look any farther than their television sets to find one of the primary agents complicit in this global fraud.

Comments

[Erl Happ]

Your message is comprehensive, accurate, well presented and timely. Let us hope that it begins to be heard soon.

As for the entirely natural causes of climatic variation over the span of a human lifetime and a little longer I have some ideas that I present at http://climatechange1.wordpress.com

[Global Warming]

Combating climate change may not be a question of who will carry the burden but could instead be a rush for the benefits, according to new economic modeling presented at “Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions” hosted by the University of Copenhagen.

Contrary to current cost models for lowering greenhouse gas emissions and fighting climate change, a group of researchers from the University of Cambridge conclude that even very stringent reductions of can create a macroeconomic benefit, if governments go about it the right way.

“Where many current calculations get it wrong is in the assumption that more stringent measures will necessarily raise the overall cost, especially when there is substantial unemployment and underuse of capacity as there is today”, explains Terry Barker, Director of Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR), Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge and a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Congress.

[EclectEcon]

Even if those concerned about anthropo- global change are correct, it seems to me like ignorance or wishful thinking or both to believe it is possible to implement any policy to reduce CO2 emissions without increasing costs in the short run (the next five - twenty years). Competition in the marketplace has reduced costs to their minimum now, using current technologies; to require firms and individuals to adopt a different technology, one that they have not freely chosen now, will surely make costs rise and/or consumer satisfaction fall (which would also be a cost).

[Ironman]

And then, there's an increasingly likelihood that anthropogenic global warming is the current science generation's equivalent of the Piltdown Man hoax:

http://www.making-ripples.com/2009/03/anthropogenic-global-warming-a-modern-piltdown-man-hoax.html

With any luck, it won't take 40 years for global warming to unravel, although given the incentives of those pushing it, and because it provides exactly what those pushing it are seeking, it very well could. Here's more about the Piltdown Man:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man