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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (109448)	11/19/2007 4:27:18 PM
From: Bill	Respond to of 173976

11/09/2007 Weather Channel Founder: Global Warming A Hoax By: Bradley Vasoli , The Bulletin Skeptics of the idea that global warming is a looming threat to the well-being of all the earth's inhabitants can count among their ranks John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel. Mr. Coleman, a meteorologist who now reports the weather for the KUSI television station in San Diego, is a member of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project (ICECAP). The group does not maintain that there has been no recent warming trend or that human beings do not intensify changes in global climate, but its members doubt that the consequences will be so dire as to steer the course of human history drastically for the worse. The organization boasts among its experts Arizona State University climatologist Robert C. Balling Jr., University of Wisconsin-Madison meteorologist Reid A. Bryson and Mr. Coleman. "It is the greatest scam in history," Mr. Coleman wrote on the ICECAP Web site. "Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long-term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the 'research' to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims." The weatherman surely will attract his share of critics for his pronouncements. Daniel Weiss, senior fellow and director of climate strategy at the leftist Center for American Progress, disputes Mr. Coleman's view as insufficiently apprehensive. "We are seeing the impacts of global warming now that were not supposed to occur until years from now," Mr. Weiss said, citing as examples the melting of Greenland's ice sheets and a higher level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than most scientists had previously predicted. The D.C.-based researcher attributed some of the recent California wildfires' intensity to global warming, mentioning the area had not gotten rain for about 150 days prior to the fires. "Whether or not the sea-level rise prediction is three feet or seven feet, we know that the phenomenon is real because it's happening today," he continued. Mr. Weiss emphasized that whatever Mr. Coleman may believe, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has received the input of thousands of scientists, among them meteorologists, biologists and climatologists that have pronounced global warming a grave threat. Those scientists who don't, he said "are in the vast minority. They are like the number of scientists who still think smoking is good for you." Such a statement elicited some light derision from Ben Lieberman, senior policy analyst at the D.C.-based, center-right Heritage Foundation. "I think there are zero scientists who've ever said that," Mr. Lieberman said of the smoking comment. He said climate policy researchers who make such statements "caricature themselves". Mr. Lieberman pointed out that many of those who fear global warming have latched onto the movement former Vice President Al Gore created when he spearheaded the film An Inconvenient Truth to claim, among various other disputed assertions, that warming will cause an 18- to 20-foot rise in sea levels. The Heritage researcher said that even the IPCC cites a figure of only between 7 to 23 inches. Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute also disputed Mr. Weiss's arguments, noting that the Greenland ice sheets underwent intense melting early in the 20th century, but few found that remarkable at the time. The sheets then reformed, only to begin melting again. "It's not as newsworthy as it might seem," Dr. Michaels said. Mr. Coleman believes soon enough the skeptics' view will be vindicated. "In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious," he wrote. "As the temperature rises, polar ice cap melting, coastal flooding and super storm pattern all fail to occur as predicted everyone will come to realize we have been duped. The sky is not falling. And, natural cycles and drifts in climate are as much if not more responsible for any climate changes underway." ©The Evening Bulletin 2007