Archive for March 11, 2010
Enough, Already…
by John Weckerle
We find ourselves shaking our heads yet again at the Mountain View Telegraph’s relentless publication of climate contrarian rants by Scott Brooks. Last week, Mr. Brooks provided yet another reference-free critique of little bits and pieces of an BBC interview with University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit director Phil Jones and a related BBC story. We’ll let our readers read the articles and come to their own conclusions, but from here it looks as if Mr. Brooks’s points on the Jones statements are 180 degrees off top dead center. Mr. Brooks’s interminable insistence that the lack of statistically significant warming during a statistically insignificant period of 15 years proves something about climate change is beginning to bore us, and his recounting of the comparison of warming periods is characteristically wide of the mark. Of course, we see similarly characteristic unqualified statements that those who believe that anthropogenic global climate change is occurring point to the winter storms as proof of global warming. That is typical hogwash; in fact, the only references to those storms proving anything that we’ve seen have been from the other side, claiming that they show that global warming is a farce. Mr. Brooks does as much in the current diatribe.
Mr. Brooks will continue to write his letters, and the Telegraph will continue to print them – and will likely continue not to provide any meaningful independent examination of the issues in question – in what appears to be a perpetual “he-said/he-said” treatment of the subject. Perhaps one sells more papers by inflaming than informing, but in this case we again wish to state that we believe the Telegraph owes its readers a little more of the latter.