The dimmer bulbs among the climate change deniers are wetting themselves with glee. It seems that their inability to digest complex evidence is shared by no less a luminary than the great John Coleman.
Who?
John Coleman is a TV weatherman. You know, one of those kinda goofy guys who jokes with anchor and hosts local auctions in church basements when the real news celebrities can’t make it?
He started his career at WCIA (TV) in Champaign, Illinois, doing weekend weather and a local show called At The Hop. He later became the weatherman for WCIA’s sister station WMBD-TV in Peoria, Illinois, then weatherman for WMAQ-TV and WLS-T, then weatherman on Good Morning America. He was one of the founders of the Weather Channel, but quit when “the bad guys took it away from me”. He’s now semi-retired, but working as the weatherman at KUSI-TV in San Diego.
Coleman is best “known” (ahem) for having popularized the words “thorms” and “thowers” to represent thunderstorms and thundershowers.
His rigorous, blistering, in-depth scientific (/sarcasm) critique charges that “Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create in [sic] allusion [sic] of rapid global warming.” (”Dastardly”? “In” “allusion”? Oh, my. Clearly we’re dealing with an intellectual heavyweight here.)
This profound analysis was published by “ICECAP“, the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, which describes itself as “not about politics, but science”. Curiously, however, ICECAP appears to promote the views only of writers sceptical about anthropogenic climate change.
Their executive director, Joseph D’Aleo, is also on the staff of the Science and Public Policy Institute, another denier group, and formerly the science policy unit of Frontiers of Freedom, self described as “an educational institute (or think tank) whose mission is to promote conservative public policy based on the principles of individual freedom, peace through strength, limited government, free enterprise, and traditional American values as found in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”
But of course, it’s all about Science. Not Politics. Not at all.
Heh. A TV weatherman as an authority on global warming. Well, why not? And coming up at 10 - Chuck Norris on American Defense Policy.
AFTERWORD: Canadian Cynic covered this amusingly yesterday, and I missed it.
I’d have more faith in the theory of man made global warming if environmentalists have ever been right about…well anything.
I remember when I was a kid being told by the same bed wetters that a new ice age was a decade or so away.
So the planet is a degree or so warmer than it was 100 years ago, big deal, it’s been warmer, it’s been cooler, many times over the planets a billion frickin’ years old. And life carries on.
That being said, I am in favor of cleaner technology, more fuel efficient cause and developing energy from more renewable resources. However I’m not going to lemming off the cliff into panic or economic suicide to do it.