The report, which came out on Feb. 2 and was the result of years of research by more than 2,500 scientific experts from 130 countries, told us what we should have already known by now.,There weren’t many surprises in the UN’s much-anticipated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) findings.
The report, which came out on Feb. 2 and was the result of years of research by more than 2,500 scientific experts from 130 countries, told us what we should have already known by now.
Global warming is undeniable, it is almost certainly caused by humans and it is going to mean some bad times ahead unless dealt with immediately.
Same as it ever was.
There also weren’t any surprises in the reaction to the report. The same people who have been telling us for years to wake up and recognize this threat reiterated their warnings.
The same skeptics who have turned a blind eye to logic and scientific fact again and again continued to do just that.
Pundits and politicians who not only refuse to act on climate change, but use their position to declare it a hoax are doing the world a particularly great disservice.
Aided by a lazy media, they are giving these blatantly false views credibility, muddying the public discourse about this issue, obscuring truth and making it difficult for the public to separate fact from oil-company-sponsored fiction.
There are many who are pretending they don’t see the dangers. The most prominent is probably Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), who called the U.N. report a political rather than scientific document and suggested it was the result of corruption.
Corruption is something Inhofe knows a thing or two about.
According to Mother Jones magazine, he received almost $290,000 from oil companies for his 2002 reelection campaign. A good chunk of that quid-pro-dough came from Exxon Mobile, which, by the way, is offering $10,000 to any scientist willing to publicly deny the IPCC findings.
The media’s presentation of the global warming debate as one with two legitimate sides-problem versus not a problem-is akin to giving equal airtime to the Flat Earth Society. It would appear that this fa