I can't yet find the transcript, but last night I was channel surfing and - horrors of all horrors - I paused on Fox News long enough to hear Sean Hannity comment on a new study on the melting of the snows on Mount Kilimanjaro (as well as, of course, tossing in a dig or two at Al Gore)
The study contradicts the claim made by Gore in Inconvenient Truth that the disappearance of the mountain's icecap is evidence of global warming. Of course Hannity's ridicules Gore's portrayal with the obvious intent to call into question the whole premise of the movie and the notion of global warming itself. And without a hint of irony Hannity goes on to make some general statement about the need to listen to scientists regarding these climate issues. Finally he notes how Gore won't have to worry as he still had all that money coming in from inventing the internet.
Now it isn't exactly a newsflash to highlight how incredibly dishonest Fox news is. However what sometimes still amazes me is how one can stop and watch 30 seconds of their nonsense and hear the most shameful transgressions of basic fact and logic. Even more unsettling is the realization that millions of people will believe it and repeat it until those who still maintain some semblance of being informed are invariably confronted with these statements while having a cold one at the local pub.
To begin with Hannity's cracking wise on the old "Gore invented the internet" is not only well passed any humor shelf life (even it had some degree of truth, which of course it doesn't), given the uncountable number of lies Bush and company have told, this type of joke is simply pathetic. Secondly and much more egregiously, is Hannity's calling into question the "environmental extremists" (his words - best translated as "round earthers" for those of us who consider the sky to be blue) claims about global warming in general. Indeed, it does appear, as climate scientist Philip Mote states, “Kilimanjaro is a grossly overused misexample of the effects of climate change..." However, shockingly, Hannity does not tell the rest of the story.
Mote is concerned that critics will try to use the article to debunk broader climate-change trends.
He hastens to add that global warming is, indeed, responsible for the fact that nearly every other glacier around the globe is melting away. Kilimanjaro just happens to be the worst possible case study.
In fact, the danger of invoking the study as some sort of evidence against global warming is considered so great by one of the authors of the 2004 study on Mount Kilimanjaro - George Kaser - that Kasar decided not to have his name put on the article on Mount Kilimanjaro that will appear in the July/August issue of American Scientist. Climate scientist Douglas Hardy adds more.
Even though the mountain presents an interesting scientific puzzle, it’s an anomaly compared to what’s happening with other glaciers, said Douglas Hardy, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Massachusetts. The new article will be seized on by “global warming naysayers” and could give people the mistaken impression that it calls global warming into question, Hardy predicted. “What value to society does that serve?” he asked.
This is really Mickey Mouse stuff. All one has to do is read the rest of the article to understand how the study of Mount Kilimanjaro has nothing to do whatsoever with the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding global warming and the contributions to it made by humans. It is surely a massive insult to one's intelligence to portray the study in any other way. However this is precisely what you get when you accidentally pause on Fox News for thirty seconds.
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