Letters to the Editor
bucky1
Published Letters: 1714
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@ engsoc
[Read the article: Yesterday's ruling on NSA warrantless eavesdropping]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...bucky1 was asking for evidence that they engage in propaganda. If this isn't it, I don't know what would be. ...
I wish you had provided Cato links since I had to search Cato to find an article on warming. I provide the link so you can see if I found one that you think is representative. I will not be going out and getting yet one more book on "global warming".
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6633
The first (and sometimes last) stop in the global-warming debate is the question, Is it real? The answer seems to be yes. Ground-based and oceanic temperature records show warming of about three-quarters of a degree Celsius in the last century. About half of that warming, however, occurred before World War II and is widely thought to be related to solar activity. Satellite and weather-balloon records, which do not go back as far, show less warming in the late 20th century than the land-based stations.
What's causing this warming? We don't know.
That does not seem like 'propaganda' to me. Perhaps I misunderstand the term.
Propaganda: information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc.
But they did go on to say this;
What do most scientists suspect is going on? The best way to ascertain the "scientific consensus" is to look at the latest report of the IPCC (released in 2001), which purports to summarize the state of scientific knowledge on global warming. Here's what it says: "Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations." The report finds that it is "unlikely (bordering on very unlikely) to be entirely the result of internal variability," and that "natural forcing alone [i.e., solar and/or volcanic activity] is unlikely to explain the increased rate of global warming since the middle of the 20th century."
The promiscuous use of such vague terms as "likely" and "unlikely" by scientists who are trained in precision speaks volumes about how much is unknown. At the very least, such language makes it impossible to accept the Greens' claim that "the debate is over," particularly given all the uncertainty -- fully discussed in the IPCC report -- regarding long-term climate records and important data on atmospheric feedbacks. In fact, uncertainty about future climate conditions is greater in the 2001 IPCC report than it was in the 1995 IPCC report.
Do other reviews of the scientific literature tell a different story? It depends on whom you ask. An article by Naomi Oreskes in Science last December examined 1,000 scientific papers published since the early 1990s. Oreskes concluded that 75 percent of those papers either directly or implicitly supported the argument that industrial emissions are driving global warming, and none directly argued to the contrary. A subsequent review of the same articles by Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer on the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, found nothing of the kind. Peiser concluded that only one-third of the papers reviewed by Oreskes actually supported the "consensus view," and only 1 percent did so explicitly.
Well man the barricades! Cato quoted the IPCC.
I just can not see how some folks are taken in by the old 'man and his sin is at fault' routine every time. I was told in college (70s) that we would see a new ice age before the end of the century and I would freeze to death --- 2000 came and went and I am still warm. (but not as warm as in the Little Climate Optimum) We did lose almost all the orange groves here in the 70s due to deep freezes that were ruinous.
I see no 'propaganda' in the Cato article, just a view that differs with your own. Does that make it 'propaganda'?
Am I spreading propaganda by telling you that we have a variable star and all evidence points to that fact?