Global Warming Snake Oil.

The following is from an article in The Australian, “Cold snap fails to cool protagonists of global warming.”

EUROPE is shivering through an extreme cold snap. One of the coldest winters in the US in more than 100 years is toppling meteorological records by the dozen, and the Arctic ice is expanding. Even Australia has been experiencing unseasonable snow.

But the stories about global warming have not stopped, not for a second.

In May last year, The Sydney Morning Herald breathlessly reported that climate change had reduced the Southern Ocean's ability to soak up carbon dioxide, claiming that as a result global warming would accelerate even faster than previously thought.

The story was picked up and repeated in a number of different journals around the region.
But this week the CSIRO suggested the exact opposite. "The new study suggests that Southern Ocean currents, and therefore the Southern Ocean's ability to soak up carbon dioxide, have not changed in recent decades," it said. This time the story got no coverage in the SMH, and was run on the ABC's website as evidence the Southern Ocean was adapting to climate change.
CSIRO oceanographer Stuart Rintoul, a co-author of the study, said it did not disprove global warming and he did not believe its lack of an alarmist tone was responsible for the poor coverage.

But the story is being pointed out as an example of media bias on global warming. Critics argue that the ABC and the Fairfax media are the worst offenders. ….

Last week (the final one of spring), I was watching snow fall in New South Wales during some of the most miserable weather I have witnessed outside Tasmania. At the same time though the GW alarmists are still going strong, urging the government toward greater and more extreme action. I guess that if you are unable to persuade the public to act on your ideas then there are always those MPs who you can con into it by playing on their feelings of self-importance and desire to have more control.

The facts on GW tend to be distorted by blatant media and government bias towards the disaster scenario, which sells papers and makes people compliant. An interesting article on the contrarian point of view comes from Hannah Hoffman at the Oregon Daily Emerald, a student newspaper titled “A Global Farce,” which appears to have the left rather agitated judging by the comments.

One of the favorite ways to attack critics is to accuse them of being funded by private enterprise, which has happened here with regard to some of the sources. One of the replies was a classic as follows: -

I do not have the exact figures to hand, but I think that oil companies have funded research by about $12 million, while the USA have funded AGW 'research' to the tune of $5 billion.