Stupid Progressive Blogger Tricks
Judd Legum needs to buy a clue. Then again, maybe he’s run out of all that Soros money.
In yet another attempt to zing Michael Steele, Legum pulls out all the old stupid environmentalist tricks:
It’s worth noting that, among the scientific community, the fact that the earth
is warming is not the subject of any debate. The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, a group of hundreds of distinguished scientists, concluded in
2007 that “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.” The panel concluded that it was “very likely” that most of the warming since the mid-20th century was due to
human activity.
Umm no! Its actually the subject of much debate, one that his side is losing, but won’t admit. Instead, much like the other Soros funded thugs of the big green machine, he resorts to juvenile tricks. An inconvenient fact that Legum cannot account for is that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1997, and according to all the major temperature recording stations the earth has actually cooled.
Legum’s loose grasp of the facts aside, his link to the IPCC Summary Report for Policy Makers (SPM) is a clever little conceit. However its an old one easily dismissed. The SPM is decidedly not a scientific report that would be the Assessment Report, in this case the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (AR4). The SPM disagrees with the underlying AR4 report, and in many cases the SPM excludes contradictory evidence from the AR4 report. But Legum either doesn’t know this or doesn’t want you to know it.
Trending: President Trump Must Be Reelected
The SPM is at its heart a political document Legum conflates a political consensus for a scientific consensus where none exists. In fact, only 52 scientists contributed to the report Legum cites. Furthermore, the IPCC review process is a grand illusion. Only 4 our of 23 independent scientific reviewers explicitly endorsed the chapter that hypothesizes man as the crucial driver of climate change, and only 62 of 308 reviewers even reviewed the relevant chapter.
Legum also presumes to tell us that the website designer, administrative assistants, network administrator, and sundry graduate students are “distinguished scientists.”
As far as Legum’s aping the rising sea level canard, none other than Richard Alley, author of the AR4 chapter on sea level rise told Congress “we don’t have a good assessed scientific foundation right now.”
Quite simply Legum is dealing in green myths to take shots at Michael Steele. Now Steele does have his problems—some of his own making—but his pronouncement on global warming isn’t one of them.
