The UN report was cited as the "end of the global warming debate," but I only know of one network (Fox News) that bothered to stress it was not the scientific report. Rather, This one was written largely by politicians and UN Bureaucrats, furthermore the scientific report is due in coming months. The Wall Street Journal summed it up nicely:
The document that caused such a stir was only a short policy report, a summary of the full scientific report due in May. Written mainly by policymakers (not scientists) who have a stake in the issue, the summary was long on dire predictions. The press reported the bullet points, noting that this latest summary pronounced with more than "90% confidence" that humans have been the main drivers of warming since the 1950s, and that higher temperatures and rising sea levels would result.
More pertinent is the underlying scientific report. And according to people who have seen that draft, it contains startling revisions of previous U.N. predictions. For example, the Center for Science and Public Policy has just released an illuminating analysis written by Lord Christopher Monckton, a one-time adviser to Margaret Thatcher who has become a voice of sanity on global warming.
Take rising sea levels. In its 2001 report, the U.N.'s best high-end estimate of the rise in sea levels by 2100 was three feet. Lord Monckton notes that the upcoming report's high-end best estimate is 17 inches, or half the previous prediction. Similarly, the new report shows that the 2001 assessment had overestimated the human influence on climate change since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.
The Democrat's anti-troop surge resolution, written with the help of a couple of flickering Republicans (most notably John Warner [R-VA]), is struggling to get the sixty votes necessary for passage. The GOP is blocking the vote until the Democrats allow two GOP-authored resolutions to come to a vote. The first is a McCain resolution supporting the troop surge that is destined to fail, and another is a key vote to forswear cutting Iraq funding before 2008. The latter will certainly pass with a bi-partisan majority, and it would be most embarrassing for the democratic resolution to pass by a smaller margin, or even fail.
"Report bombs, not cartoons." One should watch at least the last forty seconds of this video:
1 comment:
Wow... the video was awesome. :-p
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