Chicken Little McCarthyism of the globo warmers

Jay Ambrose:

NEWSWEEK magazine, which tells us in a recent edition about a "well-funded," global-warming "denial machine," is itself something of a trashing machine, a journalistic pretender that mistakes smear for substance.

The stumbling, bumbling exercise in ad hominem McCarthyism takes it as an unchallengeable truth that global warming is a human-induced catastrophe that could be readily prevented, and concludes there is just one way to explain the "naysayers" to this holy writ: They are part of a "well-coordinated," heavily financed scheme cooked up by self-serving corporate interests to dupe the public and confuse or buy off politicians.

The article not only fails to make so sweeping a case, but skips over a fact that the rawest newsroom rookie should have picked up - namely, that the Chicken Littles have outspent the cited think tanks and other groups in trying to inflict everyone with the willies, scientific exactitude be hanged.

As some of the skeptics have noted in response to Newsweek's nastiness, the expenditures of the doubters are in fact dwarfed by the multimillions skillfully deployed by environmental groups. Sure, some corporations have sought to persuade lawmakers and the public that the alarmism is itself a danger, and why not? These businesses could be badly damaged by some suggested policies that, in terms of actually achieving anything, might be little more than voodoo dances.

Newsweek thinks they would be jim-dandy. On the basis of what analysis? Nothing precise is offered.

The more you read the Newsweek piece, the more you notice it excludes still other information and argumentation that doesn't suit its thesis, material that is hugely important in understanding the issue but might get in the way of advocacy. It mentions Al Gore's apocalyptic movie about warming, for instance, without noting how misleading it was on some questions, and nowhere does it even hint at how so many alarmists have leaped over scientific justification in their near-biblical prophecies of coming calamity.

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The most egregious transgression of the article is something else, however. It is the demonizing of "contrarian scientists" and questioning think-tank analysts who are surely as honorable as those who would carelessly abuse their good names.

The article goes out of its way to tell us that one nonapocalyptic scientist, Patrick Michaels, has earned $165,000 from interested industries, as if his scientific conclusions were dictated by this money that constitutes one small portion of his livelihood.

If the magazine thinks that is how the world works, why didn't it similarly point out that NASA's James Hansen, a supporter of John Kerry in the last presidential election and one of the most outspoken scientists about the threat of warming, received a $250,000 prize from the Heinz Foundation, administered by Kerry's wife?

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Besides the perniciousnesses of their arguments on who is a paid shill, the tone of the article is one that rejects scientific inquiry and debate. They sound more like bin Laden talking about the Koran than someone truly interested in a search for the truth. for them, they have found it and they do not want anyone to challenge it. That sounds to me like they have too weak a case to stand up the challenge rather than one that is so strong it defies challenge.