FOX Caves to the Global Warming Crowd
By Patrick Michaels
November 15, 2005
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Forget “fair and balanced” on global warming. FOX News has caved to the global warming crowd, agreeing to air a “documentary” more one-sided than anything I’ve seen in the entire sad history of climate change journalism.
In fact, FOX management concedes that the program is biased. Clay Rawson, producer of the show “The Heat Is On,” recently admitted to Cybercast News Service, “Often on FOX News Channel, we present both sides, according to our ‘fair and balanced’ motto, but this is the global warming story”.
Much of the FOX documentary is filmed in Alaska, and there is considerable footage of retreating glaciers at Glacier Bay National Park in the southeastern part of the state. Glaciers there have been receding ever since John Muir first publicized them in the 19th century.
Thanks to the gold rush and the salmon fishing industry, the region offers some pretty good long-term temperature histories near Glacier Bay, from weather stations at Annette Island, Sitka, Juneau, and Yakutat. Averaging these stations from 1900 onward (and noting that the records have some gaps, and the Annette record only begins in 1940) reveals that there is no regional temperature trend—upward or downward—whatsoever when the entire 20th century is examined.
Study of average temperature across the entire huge state does find a significant jump in temperature in 1976. Climatologists have long debated the cause of that jump, which is known as the “Great Pacific Climate Shift,” and no computer model for human-induced global warming has ever simulated the event. However, since the jump, averaged Alaskan temperatures show no trend either upward or downward. That’s three decades, during the era in which there should have been the greatest changes because of carbon dioxide emissions.
That’s what makes the FOX telecast so frustrating—it presents a very simplistic conception of climate science. Consider the comments of FOX reporter Richard Folbaum on FOX’s Web site: “After months of research and interviews with experts, I’ve learned this simple fact: The earth is heating up. And it’s happening much faster than ever before. No one can argue with this.”
The first sentence is hardly news. Averaged across the globe, the planet has warmed about 0.8 degrees centigrade in the last 100 years. And humans have had something to do with the increase. But it’s difficult to square the data with global warming proponents’ claims that humanity has set in motion some sort of environmental Armageddon.
There are two periods of global warming in the last century, of roughly equal magnitude. The first one, which was especially strong in the artic, occurred from 1910 to 1940—too early to attribute to human causes. The second, beginning in the mid-1970s (note that it skipped Alaska), has a human component that is evident from the correspondence between global warming theory and the geographical distribution of temperature change.
But, with that said, Folbaum’s last two sentences are totally indefensible. Around the boundaries of the ice ages (which is where we still are), temperatures are known to go on some pretty wild excursions. In 2001, researcher Feng Hu wrote in the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that there were three periods in Alaska in the last 2,000 years that have been as warm as the current era. And just last year, researcher D. Kaufmann wrote in another respected journal, Quaternary Science Reviews, Alaska is roughly 2°C cooler than during the period 9,000 to 11,500 years ago, when humans first settled there.
It wouldn’t just be “fair and balanced” for FOX to note those findings as part of its documentary; it would be the truth. Further, if FOX were really interested in the whole story, it would have noted that the reality of global warming tells us much about the future, and that the future is hardly dire.
We have spent billions of taxpayer dollars constructing various computer models of climate change. They predict different rates of warming, but they share a common behavior, which is that once human-induced warming is established, it takes place at a constant rate. So, all one has to do in order to estimate future warming is to know how fast it is warming now.
Indeed, since the human-attributed warming trend began some 30–35 years ago, the rate of global temperature rise has been remarkably constant. (A constant warming, by definition, cannot be “much faster than ever before”. The rate in the last ten years is the same as the previous ten years, etc, and also equals the rate observed in the early 20th century).
This constant rate projects the same amount of warming in the next 50 years that was experienced in the last 100, or in the range of 0.75 degrees centigrade. That’s hardly gloom and doom, because we lived well and prospered during the warming of the last 100 years. That prosperity will not be reversed by additional warming of the same order of magnitude.
None of those points will be made during the FOX telecast. Apparently, when it comes to global warming, “fair and balanced” does not apply.
Patrick J. Michaels is a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and senior fellow at the Cato Institute (www.cato.org).
