Posted inSustainability

Fox News still denies reality of global warming

2

It never fails to amaze me that a cable news channel — Fox — is so dead-set against reporting reality.

I watch Fox News occasionally as part of my exercise regimen, since it usually only takes a few minutes of viewing to get my pulse racing into the "Outrageous!" zone. Yesterday, what got my heart rate up was more global warming B.S. inspired by Al Gore's testimony at a Senate hearing.

Fox commentators made a big deal out of the fact that it was snowing in Washington, D.C. when Gore spoke.

Which, of course, shows their abysmal ignorance regarding the difference between weather and climate. Changes in the weather happen daily; changes in climate happen over long periods of time.

There's no doubt that the Earth is warming.

The only debate is over the causes, and what should be done about it. Whether it snows in a city on a particular day has zero relevance to global warming science, but you'd never know that from listening to Fox News.

A Christian Science Monitor story asked, "It's cold. Does that debunk global warming?" Obvious answer: No.

The National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration defines climate as the average of weather over at least a 30-year period. Climate, says NOAA, is what we expect; weather is what we get.

In other words, you can’t tell much about the climate or where it’s headed by focusing on a particularly frigid day, or season, or year, even.

Yet Fox News also misled viewers by saying that 2008 was the coldest year in the United States since 2000. Here's what Fox left out: 2008 still was the ninth warmest year ever measured.

Global warming graph and map

According to NASA:

Calendar year 2008 was the coolest year since 2000, according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies analysis of surface air temperature measurements. In our analysis, 2008 is the ninth warmest year in the period of instrumental measurements, which extends back to 1880 (left panel of Fig. 1). The ten warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008. The two-standard-deviation (95% confidence) uncertainty in comparing recent years is estimated as 0.05°C [ref. 2], so we can only conclude with confidence that 2008 was somewhere within the range from 7th to 10th warmest year in the record.

Another blood-boiling bit of Fox News non-sensicality was their focus on a poll that found a high percentage of Americans (over 40%, I recall) don't believe that global warming is a big problem.

Over on a Fox blog, a global warming head-in-the-sander cited a similar, or maybe the same, poll: "A recent Rasmussen poll says 59 percent of those surveyed don’t believe mankind is warming up the planet."

Well, I can imagine a medieval version of Fox News (assuming there would be a difference from the 21st century version) intoning, "Ninety-nine percent agree with the Pope: Galileo is wrong — the sun does go around the Earth."

Scientific research, and reality in general, doesn't depend on public opinion. Truth is independent of how many people believe in something. Evolution remains a settled fact even though creationism is accepted by a disturbingly high percentage of Americans.

Fox News is looking increasingly desperate to me.

Reporters and commentors seem frantic to show that even though the Republican agenda was heartily rejected by voters the past two elections, there's still some warmth left in the conservative oven.

Not from what I see on Fox News –the same old science-denying, rich people-affirming, government-hating crap that got our country into its current problems, and deserves to be channel-flipped onto CNN or MSNBC.

Discover more from Hinessight

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

2 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *