Courier Mail: Watermelon Paper's report on Climate Change

[Adamy]

If anybody picked up todays courier mail - they would have noticed the "Green Feature". http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/indepth/date/0,,5012321,00.html

The report is so totally biased... making outlandish claims such as the following:


There will be up to 20million climate change refugees in a few years as pacific islands sink... apparently they will all come to Australia and New Zealand... notice how they play on different fears at the same time? Fears of warming and fears about immigration.... whew these guys are busy!
Winter heating bills will be reduced due to Global Warming (yeh right!! - as we shiver through record cold temps)
Almost all scientist now agree on man made Global warming - the rest are heretics.
The Barrier reef will be dead in 30 years (an oldie but a goody!)
POLAR BEARS ARE DROWNING DUE TO MELTING ICE FLOWS
and many more
Thats my personal favorite!! they say the glaziers and ice flows are melting so fast Polar Bears are drowning - what a joke!! Polar bears can both SWIM and WALK, in fact they can out run humans. Ice flows and Glaziers are supposed to be melting at the rate of so many metres each year but apparently the Bears are soo dumb they cant get out of the way of the rapidly melting ice... what a LOAD!!

Anyway...people are just accepting this report as "the facts"... we cant let them get away with it.

I say the paper is a watermelon paper because on the outside it appears nice and green but on the inside...

Have your say on their comments section - below any of the reports... I doubt whether they will publish mine below:

I read your "report" on climate change with disdain and disgust. Not because of what we are apparently doing to the planet but because of the bias of the report,which lacks any objective base, it is simply an advertisement for for the policy prescriptions of the green movement.

There is considerable conjecture regarding the "evidence" of global warming! Your own quotes from the IPCC report contradict themselves wherein they state that we will have both the risk of increased drought and sever flooding, yet they fail to substantiate these claims. This is evidence of bad reporting.

Further more they say that Global warming will reduce winter fuel bills while we shiver under record cold spell. How can they have it both ways? It is the courier Mails responsibility to investigate these claims and repudiate or validate them and yet there is no investigation here.

They also say that Polar bears are drowning due to polar ice flows melting. Where is the evidence? Polar bears and both swim and walk therefore it is inconceivable that they would simply drown instead of walking or swimming to safety if indeed there is rapidly melting ice flow. The retraction rates of the glaziers and ice flows are not receding rapidly enough to cause such events in any case Glaziers are reported to be retracting by metres every year - that being the case then how could they be retracting fast enough to drown Polar bears when they can outrun humans. It doesnt make sense much like the rest of the article.

I think you people should spend some more time in investigating the claims made by some of these green groups before publishing such outlandish claims without adequate proof. I doubt considering your obvious bias whether you will publish this comment in its entirety.

They say the science of Global warming is settled and yet real scientists know that the science is never settled and are always testing the boundaries.

Adam

[Adamy]

Note to add: Regarding the polar bears... after reviewing some of the reports - there was a case of 4 polars bears (some reports say up to 10) which were observed by air having apparently drowned (there was no autopsy to confirm the method of death) a long way from land AFTER a massive storm at sea. The "evidence" used to substantiate the deaths due to Global warming was an extrapolation - a best guess which inferred that if they saw 4 polar bear over x miles of area flown over - then how many polar bears DIDNT they see over the rest of the arctic.

It was also documented that the observers which counted these dead polar bears refused to say what they died of, but other "scientists" and newsmakers were more than happy to report the "REAL" cause of the these events.

Dont it make you wonder!!

Adam

[Little grey men]

It makes for interesting reading is all. Those idiots don't care if the facts are solid or not. The Global warming thing is trendy at the moment so they figure let's print some crap and cash in.

[reidy_g]

With you 100% on this. I'm sick to death of hearing about this rubbish. Having survived Y2K, mad cow disease, bird flu, SARS, AIDS, and nuclear holocaust, you'll forgive me for being a little skeptical. ;)

[fishingjew]

Environmental activist Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute, has been accused of many things throughout his career, but poor taste had never been one of them. That was, until America suffered the worst terrorist attack in history.

Just 24 hours after the World Trade Center morphed instantly from a thriving center of commerce to a harrowing mass grave, Brown claimed that rising sea levels from human-caused global warming are "a potential for disaster that could make what happened in New York yesterday look small".

Civilization is being trapped between expanding deserts and rising sea levels - two forces of our "own creation." Brown had in mind the nine tiny atolls that comprise Tuvalu in the Pacific Ocean. Situated between Hawaii and Australia,

Tuvalu is the country with the world¹s fourth smallest land area and compares in size to one-tenth the area of Washington, DC. Touting the claim that the ocean is swallowing Tuvalu, Brown says: "The leaders of Tuvalu have conceded defeat in their battle with the rising sea, announcing that they will abandon their homeland."

In 1997, a Tuvaluan official, Toaripi Lauti told international delegates to a climate change convention that "the impacts of global warming on our islands are real and are already threatening our very survival and existence." And Leo Falcam, President of the Federated States of Micronesia, expects massive population relocation as the only option for relocating the world's "first climate change refugees".
Brown and other environmental activists now consider 10,000 Tuvaluans the world's first refugees of human-made global warming - blamed, in their view, on the United States' gluttonous energy consumption that generates greenhouse gases that warm the planet and cause the seas to rise.

Sounds serious enough. So what's going on? The coastline of Tuvalu is, indeed, changing. The atolls of Tuvalu rest on sinking volcanic rock atop which new coral grows to replace the coral die-off that occurs as the volcanic rock subsides deeper into the ocean where coral does not survive. Such island growth is slow. And it would certainly be too slow to keep pace with forecast sea level rise attributable to global warming. Brown has been quoted as saying that the oceans rose 8 to 12 inches in the last century.

Brown avers: "My sense is sea-level rise is a reasonably well-established trend."

Check the Science

Well, rather than rely on Brown's "sense" of sea level rise, let's check the instruments. As it turns out, estimates of globally averaged sea level rise in the 20th century are irrelevant since Tuvalu's local sea level change is very different from the globally averaged change.

There are three estimates of sea level changes for Tuvalu. The first is a satellite record showing that the sea level has actually fallen four inches around Tuvalu since 1993 when the hundred-million dollar international TOPEX/POSEIDON satellite project record began. Second comes from the modern instruments recording tide gauge data since 1978.

There the record for Tuvalu shows ups and downs of many inches over periods of years. For example, the strong El Nino of 1997-98 caused the sea level surrounding Tuvalu to drop just over one foot. The El Nino Southern Oscillation is a natural - as opposed to man-made -future of the Pacific Ocean, as areas of the Pacific periodically warm then cool every few years, causing significant sea level rises and falls every few years in step with the co-oscillations of the ocean and atmosphere.

The overall trend discerned from the tide gauge data, according to Wolfgang Scherer, Director of Australia's National Tidal Facility, remains flat. "One definitive statement we can make," states Scherer, "is that there is no indication based on observations that sea level rise is accelerating." Finally, there is the new estimate by scientists at the Centre Nationale d¹Etudes Spatiales who also find that between 1955 and 1996 the sea level surrounding Tuvalu dropped four inches.


All these measurements show that Tuvalu has suffered, at worst, no sea level rise. So much for Brown's sense of sea level trends for Tuvalu.


Man-Made Problems
That said, there are some local problems that have changed the coastline of Tuvalu and mimic sea level rise. Sand is excavated for building material on Tuvalu. The excavation for building material has eroded the beach, thus giving the impression of rising sea to the casual observer. "The island is full of holes and seawater is coming through these, flooding areas that weren't normally flooded 10 or 15 years ago," according to Tuvalu environmental official, Paani Laupepa.


It is likely that the beach erosion and building on the island caused the sea flooding of areas over the last decade. And that is a true environmental concern. But it is a local, man-made problem that will not be solved with massive cuts in carbon dioxide emission.

An environmental official of Tuvalu, Elisala Pita, is concerned with the alarmism of western eco-imperialists. In an interview in the Canadian Globe and Mail on November 24, Pita says that, "This [coastal] erosion is caused by man-made infrastructure. Tuvalu is being used for the issue of climate change. People are telling all these lies, just using Tuvalu to prove their point. No island is sinking. Tuvalu is not sinking. It is still floating."

These small atolls have few natural resources, including fresh groundwater. Catch basins or desalination plants form the only fresh water available.
With such limited resources, the alarmism of western environmentalists will do nothing to help Tuvaluans. Only the scientific facts will.

Dr Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon, are co-hosts, Tech Central Station and Associate of the Harvard College Observatory.

[cuzzamundi]

thanks once again adamy! it certainly is a trendy concept. the problem is that these 'independent' forms of media fail to seek TRUTH, and instead publish with the fear obsessed majority in mind. objectivity just doesn't exist in this realm, and the unfortunate fact is that most of society's troglodytes are susceptible to being wrongly influenced. look at the backlash which resulted from that abc doco which countered the gore theory! thanks for the heads up mate, and keep em coming.

cuzza

[Bowser]

I loved the bias in the presenter to the anti global warming program, on the ABC, who when he attempted to stick it to the non believer was told that "the piercing interview he had done with the program maker was very good, well reserched and asked pertinant questions regarding weaknesses in the program". He was then asked why he didn't use the same well founded approach to Gore after viewing his program. He rejected this question with the comment that "you are not here to ask questions."

I also loved a comment made this morning in an interview with Clive James on radio who said "Isn't it funny that when the temperature drops we stop calling it Global Warming and start to call it Climate Change!"