If people haven’t noticed, there are a few “flat-earthers” over at the Orange County Register who will cite just about anything to support their belief that global warming does not exist, or if it does it is not the result of human impacts. My favorite of this group is Mark Landsbaum. He is an editorial writer and comments most often on the Orange Punch blog.
In a post Shsssssssss. Keep global warming dissention quieton June 29th, Landsbaum cites a FoxNews.com report claiming that the Obama administration is suppressing a report that “the EPA may have suppressed an internal analysis that questioned the science behind global warming alarmism.”
From his quotation of the report:
This from FOXNews.com:
“The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin’s report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined.
“â€He came out with the truth. They don’t want the truth at the EPA,†Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, a global warming skeptic, told FOX News, saying he’s ordered an investigation. “We’re going to expose it.â€
Someone should tell Mark that quoting a Fox News report should be done rarely and with care. Matt Drudge gets stuff right more often than Fox and that isn’t really a high bar to set. The story is bull crap spin and the arguments put forward by Alan Carlin have been widely discredited as inaccurate at best.
Media Matters goes into a bit more detail on the slanted and discredited reporting on this matter in their July 1st story Fox News runs with global temperature decline falsehood:
SUMMARY: Several Fox News figures have used a purportedly “suppressed” EPA document to advance the falsehood that, in Steve Doocy’s words, “for the last 11 years, temperatures had been dropping.”
Following allegations that the EPA “suppressed” an internal document that was skeptical of climate change, several Fox News figures have advanced the document’s false claim — previously repeatedby CBS — that, in Fox News host Steve Doocy’s words, “for the last 11 years, temperatures had been dropping.” In fact, Doocy’s claim simply is not true.
A draft of the EPA document stated in one of its “principal comments” that “[g]lobal temperatures have declined — extending the current downtrend to 11 years with a particularly rapid decline in 1907-8 [sic].” The document went on to state that “[g]lobal temperatures have declined (Figure 1a) — extending the current run of time with a statistically robust lack of global temperature rise to eight years (Figure 1b), with some people arguing that it can be traced back for 12 years.”
In fact, as Media Matters for America has noted, annual global average temperatures have both risen and fallen over the past 11 years, and while there have been some relatively cooler years during that period — including a decline in each of the past three relative to the year before — climate scientists reject the ideathat those temperatures are any indication that global warming is slowing or does not exist. Scientists have identified a long-term warming trend spanning several decades that is independent from the normal climate variability — which includes relatively short-term changes in climate due to events like El Niño and La Niña — to which they attribute the recent relatively cooler temperatures.
Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in a June 26 RealClimate.org post that in reading the internal EPA document that Carlin co-authored, “[o]ne can see a number of basic flaws [in its main points]; the complete lack of appreciation of the importance of natural variability on short time scales, the common but erroneous belief that any attribution of past climate change to solar or other forcing means that CO2 has no radiative effect, and a hopeless lack of familiarity of the basic science of detection and attribution.”
Read the complete Fox News runs with global temperature decline falsehood report.
So much for the never ending contributions to global warming in the form of CO2 emitions by Mark Landsbaum. Mark, It’s fine if you want to keep your head in the sand, but please pick more reputable sources to support your “STATE OF GLOBAL WARMING DENIAL.” All you accomplish is making it easier to debunk your claims.