Month 4, Day 11: The Wall Street Journal – Fishwrap for Financiers

It’s 11 pm and I’m finishing this one up. I couldn’t think of what to write, so I checked out Media Matters, which had a good treatment of a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. So I wrote them a letter (the WSJ, not Media Matters).

Speaking of Media Matters, I greatly enjoyed David Brock’s book “Blinded by the Right.” It’s always amazing to me that anyone can swallow the nonsense spewed by so-called “conservatives,” and Brock’s personal story was very revealing. I’m glad he came around and is now on the side of the right, rather than the Right.

Anyway, here’s my letter to the Journal:

Bret Stephens’ April 6 column suggests that recent scientific research shows that “global warming is dead.” Yet the climate scientists he cites explicitly reject this notion.

While Stephens claims that National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) data show that Arctic sea ice has not diminished significantly, the NSIDC disagrees, stressing that long term data (in contrast to data for a single month) indicate that “ice extent has shown a dramatic overall decline over the past thirty years.”

Stephens’ also discussed the “now debunked claim about disappearing Himalayan glaciers” in the context of the so-called “Climategate” scandal. Is he aware that scientists’ studies around the world unanimously support data showing significant glacier loss? And is he also oblivious to the fact that on March 31, the British House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee completely exonerated Dr. Phil Jones and the CRU, confirming that their data are “consistent and independently verifiable”? Yes, the 2007 IPCC report included an erroneous citation about Himalayan glacier loss, but this no more invalidates the document’s conclusions than a mendacious op-ed about global warming invalidates the Wall Street Journal’s stock market reports.

Warren Senders