Shock: Newsweek runs balanced article on climate

Shock climate realism

Like toppling dominoes, media organisations and institutions are changing their stance on climate at an astonishing rate. Having realised that they have been thoroughly taken in my the politically and financially driven alarmism of the IPCC and many climate scientists, they are now back-pedalling furiously in order to limit the damage to their reputations. Newsweek, a veritable bastion of climate hysteria (thanks in no small part to the rantings of Sharon Begley), publishes a remarkably balanced article about the current state of the climate debate (thanks to Climate Depot):

This is no dispute between objective scientists and crazed flat-earthers. The lines cut through the profession itself. Very few scientists dispute a link between man-made CO2 and global warming. Where it gets fuzzy is the extent and time frame of the effect. One crucial point of contention is climate “sensitivity”—the mathematical formula that translates changes in CO2 production to changes in temperature. In addition, scientists are not sure how to explain a slowdown in the rise of global temperatures that began about a decade ago.

The backlash against climate science is also about the way in which leading scientists allied themselves with politicians and activists to promote their cause. Some of the IPCC’s most-quoted data and recommendations were taken straight out of unchecked activist brochures, newspaper articles, and corporate reports—including claims of plummeting crop yields in Africa and the rising costs of warming-related natural disasters, both of which have been refuted by academic studies.

Just as damaging, many climate scientists have responded to critiques by questioning the integrity of their critics, rather than by supplying data and reasoned arguments. When other researchers aired doubt about the IPCC’s prediction that Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, the IPCC’s powerful chief, Rajendra Pachauri, trashed their work as “voodoo science.” Even today, after dozens of IPCC exaggerations have surfaced, leading climate officials like U.N. Environment Program chief Achim Steiner and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research head Joachim Schellnhuber continue to tar-brush critics as “anti-Enlightenment” and engaging in “witch hunts.”

All very reasonable commentary, which ACM fully endorses. And the final paragraph sums it up well:

There are excellent reasons to limit emissions and switch to cleaner fuels—including an estimated 750,000 annual pollution deaths in China, the potential to create jobs at home instead of enriching nasty regimes sitting on oil wells, the need to provide cheap sources of power to the world’s poorest regions, and the still-probable threat that global warming is underway. At the moment, however, certainty about how fast—and how much—global warming changes the earth’s climate does not appear to be one of those reasons.

Well said indeed. Let’s wait for the inevitable backlash and torrent of ad hominems from the hysterics towards this poor author…

Read it here (and reinstate my subscription – maybe).