Citizen Power

Every winter when it gets cold somewhere the climate change deniers come out of the woodwork and claim we are headed for a new Ice Age and that the usual cold weather proves global warming is bunk. This happened Tuesday night on the Lou Dobbs show on CNN. Lou Dobbs had two climate change deniers on his show along with one environmentalist. This form of presentation disguised as logic is meaningless, but the media loves it because it gets people to argue (and American media is now mostly all about fights, not debates). Dobbs began this segment asking if we are entering a new Ice Age and said that 2008 was one of the coolest years on record since 1998. (A very misleading thing to say). His first speaker was Joseph D’Aleo, co-founder of the weather channel, is a climate change denier. He said 2008 was the 14th “coldest” year on record (not true) according to “satellite data” which in his mind is more accurate than any other kind of data. Naturally, he didn’t explain why.

Then Jay Lehr of the Heartland Institute said he is of the Fred Singer school of thought (that global warming isn’t real) and that sunspots cause most of our warming. And because sunspot activity is down, he said he felt we were in a major cooling period. He was on the show to warn Congress not to pass legislation regarding climate change, like pollution standards, cap and trade, and what he called “dramatic legislation”.

Dobbs asked if we should be concerned about our carbon footprint, and he was answered by his third guest, Alex Wissner-Gross of C02stats.com (see my Green label from them at the top of the left-hand column). They seem to be a good organization, but Alex admitted that to him, “efficiency is most important, carbon footprint second.” He’s a professor at Harvard, so I think he should know better and maybe he did; Dobbs only let him talk briefly.

Dobbs then brought up a good point — we should be reasonable stewards of the planet even if global warming is real or not, in his opinion. This got an agreement from Joe and Jay. Joe said yes, we need conservation whether it continues to cool or warm, warming being in his mind a “far less dangerous scenario”, and to him, throwing in whatever he could before his time was up, he said that includes “nuclear, coal . . . and whatever it takes.” He just wanted to get “coal” in there. Tell me, how does a person start the Weather Channel without knowing a darned thing about science? Maybe he just likes storms.

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