Did ABC News Jump Off the Climate Change Bandwagon?

The Mainstream Media has been very reluctant to cover any chink in the global warming armor. For example, four days after climategate broke, Newsbusters reported:

...that hacked e-mail messages from a British university suggested a conspiracy by some of the world's leading global warming alarmists -- many with direct ties to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- to manipulate temperature data, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC through Monday evening have completely ignored the subject.

The MSM ignored the story because they bought into the "global warming consensus" hoax hook, line and sinker. Today however, one network ABC, jumped off the "consensus" bandwagon, it isn't calling Global warming a hoax, but it is asking questions:

... Himalayan glacier is also at the center of a scientific dispute. In its current report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the glacier, which is 71 kilometers (44 miles) long, could disappear by 2035. It also predicts that the other 45,000 glaciers in the world's highest mountain range will be virtually gone by then, with drastic consequences for billions of people in Asia, whose life depends on water that originates in the Himalayas. The IPCC report led environmental activists to sound the alarm about a drama that could be unfolding at the "world's third pole."

"This prognosis is, of course, complete nonsense," says John Shroder, a geologist and expert on glaciers at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. The results of his research tell a completely different story.

WOW,this is from the network that Ignored Climategate but instead poured gasoline on the fire, one of the early days of the scandal, ABCNews.com's top story was, "Worse Than the Worst: Climate Report Says Even Most Dire Predictions Too Tame" There's even less time for humanity to try to curb global warming than recently thought, according to a new in-depth scientific assessment by 26 scientists from eight countries.

The gaffe over the Himalayan glaciers has triggered an outcry in the world of climatology. Some are already using the word "Glaciergate" in reference to the scandal over a scientifically untenable claim in the fourth IPCC assessment report, which the UN climate body publishes every five years. The fourth assessment report was originally published in 2007. Last week, the IPCC withdrew the erroneous claim and apologized for the error.

German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen, a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is also upset about the incident. "The error in the IPCC report is serious and should not have happened,"...But why wasn't this clearly nonsensical claim noticed long ago by at least one of the 3,000 scientists who contributed to the IPCC report? "What's really amazing is that such a blunder remained uncorrected for so long," says Shroder.

....other climatologists are calling for consequences. They insist that IPCC Chairman and Nobel laureate Rajendra Pachauri is no longer acceptable as head of the panel, particularly because of his personal involvement in the affair. "Pachauri should resign, so as to avert further damage to the IPCC," says German climatologist Hans von Storch. "He used the argument of the supposed threat to the Himalayan glacier in his personal efforts to raise funds for research." Storch claims that the Indian-born scientist did not order the retraction of the erroneous prediction until it had generated considerable public pressure.

Amazingly the man in charge of the project  for the IPCC Dr Murari Lal, knew all along the prediction did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research. But the prediction was not fixed because they wanted to be able to put additional pressure on policy makers to take global warming action:

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

ABC then goes on to talk about the eroding of confidence in man-made global warming theories.

"Confidence in the authority of the science of climatology is currently eroding in the public consciousness," says Roger Pielke Jr., an American social economist and expert on natural disasters. Environmental economist Richard Tol agrees, saying: "Criticism of climate research has become fashionable." And the British science journal Nature warns that climatologists can no longer assume that solid evidence alone will convince the public.
New Ammunition from an E-Mail Scandal

For years, malaria expert Paul Reiter of the Paris-based Pasteur Institute has criticized the warning, as expressed in the third IPCC report, that climate change will lead to the spread of malaria, saying that there is no evidence to support such a claim. Reiter accuses many climatologists of perceiving themselves too strongly as activists who are more interested in spreading an alarmist message.

Scientists already feel that the second part of the IPCC report, which addresses the consequences of global warming, is not as sound as the first part, which deals with the underlying physical factors contributing to climate change. This could, in fact, explain how the erroneous Himalayan prognosis slipped into the report in the first place. The report's lead author, Murari Lal, defends himself by saying that "the melting of the glaciers is such a huge threat to so many people" and, for that reason, had to be included in the report. According to malaria researcher Reiter, it is precisely this passion that is so dangerous to science.

As part of this report the network finally talks about Climategate:

The e-mails hackers stole from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia last November and placed on the Internet have also provided critics with new ammunition. An e-mail exchange between climate modelers that took place in the fall of 1999 suggests that the scientists were biased.

...they even question the Hockey Stick:

The exchange involved the validity of a controversial temperature curve. The so-called hockey stick graph was intended to prove that the average global temperature in the last 1,000 years was never as high as it is today. To arrive at the date, several groups of researchers reconstructed past temperatures, to a large extent based on tree-ring data.

But one of the graphs differed markedly from the rest, leading to a controversy in the run-up to a conference of paleo-climatologists in Tanzania in September 1999. The abnormal temperature graph was "a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably consensus viewpoint we'd like to show," paleo-climatologist Michael Mann wrote in an e-mail, adding that he didn't want to be the one to offer "the skeptics & a field day." The lead author of the IPCC chapter, Chris Folland, wrote in another e-mail that the divergent data set "dilutes the message rather significantly."

....For the IPCC report that was written at the time, the scientists eventually resorted to an underhanded solution to downplay the data behind Briffa's graph, which showed temperatures falling since the 1960s: the graph was simply cut off at 1960 in the IPCC report. "This sort of approach is considered problematic in science," says climate scientist Storch.

Briffa's unusually declining temperature graph points to a serious conundrum that no one has been able to explain yet: Since the 1960s, the tree-ring data no longer reflect actual temperature changes. But why, then, should tree-ring data be valid for periods before that?

At least the fourth IPCC report, published in 2007, discusses the problems with the tree-ring data at length. But even the current, valid report contains controversial passages.

Chapter 1.3.8, for example, contains a discussion of the possible relationship between climate change and the increased incidence of natural disasters, which, after Hurricane Katrina in the United States, have now become a politically charged issue.

At the IPCC report, the damage associated with such events "are very likely to increase due to increased frequencies and intensities of some extreme weather events" (italics in original). The report cites as evidence a study that supposedly demonstrates precisely this trend.

The only problem is that the study in question had not been subjected to outside peer review before the IPCC report went to press. This has since been done, and the conclusions are surprising: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses," read the report published in the compendium "Climate Extremes and Society."

Roger Pielke, a leading expert in this field, wrote in his blog: "The claims were not just wrong. The claims were based on knowledge that just doesn't exist."

This report from ABC.com, may have been the very first time a MSM outlet actually covered the hoax stories associated with global warming. Granted, it was ABC.com and not the broadcast network, but it was a "chink in the armor."

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