http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladnick/2009/09/20/u-s-media-ignori...

U.S. Media Ignoring About Face by Leading Global Warming Proponent

By P.J. Gladnick
September 20, 2009 - 10:45 ET

Imagine if the Pope suddenly announced that the Catholic Church  had been
wrong for centuries about prohibiting priests from marrying. Would that be
considered big news?
Of course.

And yet something like that has happened in the field of global warming in
which a major scientist has announced that the world, in contrast to his
previous belief, is actually cooling.

This was the analogy made by columnist Lorne Gunter in the Calgary Herald:

Imagine if Pope Benedict gave a speech saying the Catholic Church has had it
wrong all these centuries; there is no reason priests shouldn't marry. That
might generate the odd headline, no?

...When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting
for the other side, it's usually newsworthy.

So why was a speech last week by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz
Institute not given more prominence?

Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the
recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author
for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He
has contributed significantly to the IPCC's last two five-year reports that
have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the
planet to warm dangerously.

Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN's World Climate Conference--an annual
gathering of the so-called "scientific consensus" on man-made climate
change --Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and
that we are likely entering "one or even two decades during which
temperatures cool."

The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming
caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that
heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.

But as Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic,
has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for
10 to 20 more years.

"How much?" he wondered before the assembled delegates. "The jury is still
out."

But it is increasingly clear that global warming is on hiatus for the time
being. And that is not what the UN, the alarmist scientists or
environmentalists predicted. For the past dozen years, since the Kyoto
accords were signed in 1997, it has been beaten into our heads with the
force and repetition of the rowing drum on a slave galley that the Earth is
warming and will continue to warm rapidly through this century until we
reach deadly temperatures around 2100.

While they deny it now, the facts to the contrary are staring them in the
face: None of the alarmist drummers ever predicted anything like a 30-year
pause in their apocalyptic scenario.

How have Latif and other global warming scientists reconciled their previous
belief in global warming with the inconvenient truth staring them in the
face? Many claim that global warming will resume after this global cooling
phase:

  Latif says he expects warming to resume in 2020 or 2030.

  In the past year, two other groups of scientists--one in Germany, the
second in the United States--have come to the same conclusion: Warming is on
hold, likely because of a cooling of the Earth's upper oceans, but it will
resume.

  But how is that knowable? How can Latif and the others state with
certainty that after this long and unforeseen cooling, dangerous man-made
heating will resume? They failed to observe the current cooling for years
after it had begun, how then can their predictions for the resumption of
dangerous warming be trusted?

So are these the isolated opinions of a Canadian columnist? Nope. A BBC
blogger, Tom Feilden, also made similar observations:

  The global warming narrative - that mankind's addiction to burning fossil
fuels is rapidly changing the climate - may be about to go seriously off
message.

  Far from suggesting the planet will get warmer, one of the world's leading
climate modellers says the latest data indicates we could be in for a
significant period of steady temperatures and possibly even a little global
cooling.

  Professor Mojib Latif, from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at
Kiel University in Germany, has been looking at the influence of cyclical
changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the Atlantic, a feature known
as the North Atlantic Oscillation. When he factored these natural
fluctuations into his global climate model, professor Latif found the
results would bring the remorseless rise in average global temperatures to
an abrupt halt.

   "The strong warming effect that we experienced during the last decades
will be interrupted. Temperatures will be more or less steady for some
years, and thereafter will pickup again and continue to warm".

  With apologies to Al Gore, professor Latif's finding is something of an
"inconvenient truth" for the global warming debate.

Feilden provides a reason why Latif's finding is currently being ignored by
most of the media:

  But the complex message professor Latif's research confronts us with,
points up another issue debated on the programme this morning: The thorny
issue of the media's handling of science.

  The Science Minister Lord Drayson sparked a row when he claimed that the
coverage of scientific issues was in rude health at the World Conference of
Science journalists. Ben Goldacre, the author of "Bad Science" took
exception, arguing that most editors were only interested in revolutionary
cures for cancer, or whether coffee made you fat.

And most members of the MSM in the United States are interested only in
viewpoints that conform with the global warming dogma that they have been
strongly promoting for the past few years. No inconenient truths allowed
that would saw off the limb they went out on.

-P.J. Gladnick is a freelance writer and creator of the DUmmie FUnnies blog.