National Post on global warming climate destabilization
The National Post has a decidedly denialist narrative. Do a search for “National Post climate change” and you get a series of articles on the brave scientists “bucking the conventional wisdom.”
Or, if you prefer the second choice, you get a series of article tagged “climate change” by Peter Foster, Lorne Gunter and Rex Murphy:
The billion-dollar Environment department claims its work is “science-based,” but the briefing notes show that it relies for its beliefs about man-made climate change on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose credibility has been severely damaged by numerous scandals. Still, when one considers how many jobs at Environment depend on a combination of climate alarmism and starry-eyed optimism about the policy process, plus attendance at those endless rounds of international meetings in exotic places, it’s not surprising they plead for the issue to be taken seriously. – Peter Foster, “Bureaucrats offer up green misinformation” Aug 2, 2011
It is essentially to remember — and to help people sleep at night — that the temperature consequences of increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are hotly debated by well-credentialled scientific skeptics, whose case has been bolstered by Climategate and the flood of scandals about the politicization, corruption and incompetence of the IPCC (even if that flood hasn’t quite washed up on the shores of the mainstream media). — “CO2 just not capable of trapping dangerous heat” Lorne Gunter, Jul 29, 2011 – Saturday, Nov. 13, 2010
It is absolutely terrible reporting. It’s not news. It public relations for the oil industry. And it’s not new. It also fits the pattern of the problem of the Conservative White Men.
I wish I could say I was laughing after reading these quotes. They are so ridiculous that I should be.
But it is not particularly funny that the National Post, and other media outlets, seek to deceive the public into believing that there is healthy disagreement amongst the best scientists regarding the causes and implications of climate change. Nor is it the least bit amusing when reporters seek to discredit large institutions such as Environment Canada or the UN’s IPCC with one fell swoop.
Does it matter that Peter Foster has no scientific training and won a “Lifetime Achievement Award” from the Petroleum History Society in 1998? I cannot say categorically but, at best, it doesn’t exactly give me confidence that Mr. Foster is writing about Climate Change from an informed and objective point of view.
What worries me just as much, is that the public doesn’t appear to care. We gobble up misinformation and rhetoric, hastily forming opinions that tend to support business as usual policies – all based on journalistic schlock.
This is decidedly not funny when we’re talking about a matter of fundamental public interest. Yet somehow, we trust newspapers like the National Post, even when their reporting verges on deceit (as in the stories quoted above).
I’ve mused about all of this before so I won’t go on. To read more and find some links to peer reviewed science on climate change follow this link:
http://www.timirvin.com/climate-change-2/the-best-scientists-agree-humans-are-causing-climate-change/