Washington Times Editor in Chief Wes Pruden’s rant today in the Western Jewish Bulletin shows a blatant lack of understanding of the scientific process and highlights the fact that some people, no matter how many studies and reports by the world’s top scientists verify the science behind man-made climate, will never accept that it is happening.
One conclusion may be that people like Pruden are the victim of some psychological phenomenon of denial – protecting themselves from the believing in the reality of global warming as a means of warding off the major anxiety that such a reality would produce.
It might be that, but I am more inclined to think that Pruden just doesn’t get it and has never spent the time to read past the journal title or the news release.
Yesterday the National Academy of Sciences, an organization tasked with providing non-partisan, objective scientific advice to Congress, verified that Dr. Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph showing major spikes in the earth’s temperature was conclusive in that “… warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last thousand years.”
This is great news, in that it again affirms the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which reviews the findings of more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries. You would think this might be enough to put the issue to rest, but the report goes much further than that.
Here is another statement in the NAS report: “Based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this newer supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium.”
In other words: taking Mann’s study along with all of the research that has been done since Mann’s study, the NAS concludes that it has been warmer in the last 200 years, than it has ever been in the last 1,000 years.
And a final note from the study: “The committee pointed out that surface temperature reconstructions for periods before the Industrial Revolution – when levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases were much lower – are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that current warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence.”
In other words: global warming is happening and the scientific evidence shows that it is caused by us. Of course this is still not good enough for like Pruden and the rest of the cadre of so-called climate change “skeptics.”
In fact, for many various reasons nothing will ever be good enough. There are literally thousands of studies, produced by thousands of scientists, published in the top peer-reviewed scientific journals in the world and people like Pruden continue to deny the reality of man-made global warming.
Sadly, the effect of this denial is powerful, especially when it is the editor of the Washington Times, and continues to delay any real action on climate change by the US administration.
