A 224-page report released yesterday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration documents in great scientific detail how specific, climate-related indicators all point in the same direction: toward an increasingly warmer world.
In its online story about the report, which was based on the work of more than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries, CNN devoted more than half the space to — SURPRISE! — a response from climate skeptics.
Well, no, not a surprise really, given CNN’s recent history of false balance when it comes to climate change coverage.
First, though, the report…
From increasing temperatures in the atmosphere and oceans to rising humidity and melting of the Earth’s cryosphere, 10 major variables — illustrated in the chart above from NOAA — show that the Earth is indeed heating up, according to the report. These factors all point in the same direction and cannot be easily explained away.
In a NOAA video, Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center summed up the significance of the changes:
“From the poles to the equator, from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean — all are telling us that things are getting warmer. That’s really persuasive evidence.”
From the report itself:
If the land surface records were systematically flawed and the globe had not really warmed, then it would be almost impossible to explain the concurrent changes in this wide range of indicators produced by many independent groups.
Year to year, purely natural variations in the climate make it difficult if not impossible to identify true long-term trends. In other words, one or two really hot or really cool years say nothing conclusive about global warming. But when climate is examined decade to decade, a clear global warming trend stands out: Each of the last three decades has been warmer than the one before it, with the 2000s 0.6 degrees C warmer than the 1960s and 1970s.
Sea surface temperatures have been rising as well, with 1998, 2003, 2005 being the three warmest years since 1950, and 2009 following not far behind. The amount of heat stored in the oceans has risen too, especially since 1990. Concurrently, sea level has risen — 2 to 3 millimeters a year since 2003.
While the extent of sea ice around Antarctica has increased slightly (by about 1 percent), in the Arctic region sea ice has shrunk by about 4 percent a year and also thinned dramatically. (Differences in geography and other factors help explain why Antarctic sea ice has not been affected by warming temperatures the way Arctic sea ice has. For more information, check out the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s “Arctic vs Antarctic” page.)
According to the report, 2008 marked the 18th consecutive year that more ice was lost by the world’s alpine glaciers than gained. Meanwhile, in Greenland the 34 widest glaciers that terminate in the ocean lost 100 square kilometers in 2009. Between 2000 and 2009, the loss of ice (measured at the end of summer) totaled almost 1,000 square kilometers. That’s an area equivalent to 11 Manhattan islands.
What was CNN’s response to all of this? Why, reprint a story from Financial Times of course — presumably because there is no one left at at the network who actually knows anything about science and the environment. And it turns out that at least half of that story is devoted to criticisms from four climate skeptics. (The analysis from The Ways Things Break puts the percentage of space devoted to false balance at more than half. Check it out for the nifty color-coded graphic!)
So more than 200 pages of well-documented science compiled by more than 300 scientists is evenly balanced with comments like this one, from Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute:
“It’s clear that the scientific case for global alarmism is weak. The scientific case for [many of the claims] is unsound and we are finding out all the time how unsound it is.”
Of course, we then have the requisite comeback by NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco, just for the sake of balance I guess.
That’s CNN’s coverage on the Web. But I really can’t wait to hear how Eliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker will handle stories like this on the air.
You didn’t know that CNN had hired New York’s former governor (that’s right, the one who patronized prostitutes) to go head-to-head with the syndicated conservative columnist in a new shoutfest program that will take over the network’s 8 p.m. slot? Or even better, how Piers Morgan will handle research about the fate of the planet. Not sure who he is? Here’s how the New Yorker describes Morgan in an excellent analysis of CNN’s depressing slide:
“. . . the British celebrity interviewer, talent-competition judge, and former editor of the British tabloids the News of the World and the Daily Mirror, from which he was fired in 2004 for refusing to acknowledge the paper’s mistake in publishing photographs purporting to show British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners—photos that were quickly exposed as fakes.”
With this crew, false balance will probably be the least of our problems . . .
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