I read most of the article up until the Media part, because I already believe the media hypes everything, and climate change is no exception. Anyway, I didn't feel the article was all that bad, in fact, the Senator seemed like he knew what he was talking about. That could just be my lack of knowledge, which is probably horrible compared to the Senator's.
These are just a few things I found weird though...
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a new study in Geophysical Research Letters found that the sun was responsible for 50% of 20th century warming.
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If this is true, I'd like to how or why. The sun didn't just get warmer, so this would obviously something to look into to see if it has any connection to problems global warming might have caused, and therefore, caused the sun to have a more direct effect on us.
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The history of the modern environmental movement is chock full of predictions of doom that never came true. We have all heard the dire predictions about the threat of overpopulation, resource scarcity, mass starvation, and the projected death of our oceans. None of these predictions came true, yet it never stopped the doomsayers from continuing to predict a dire environmental future.
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What any of these things has to do with climate change, I'm really not sure. Just because dire predictions made in the past turned out wrong later doesn't mean some dire predictions made in some other area can't possibly be true.
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This costly feel-good California measure, which is actually far less severe than Kyoto, will have no impact on the climate -- only the economy.
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For all the arguing about bad science or unsupported beliefs, I'd have to say this one is the biggest problem the Senator threw out without any evidence to show he's correct. "Why, nothing will happen!" "How do you know?" "Cause."
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If we allow scientifically unfounded fears of global warming to influence policy makers to restrict future energy production and the creation of basic infrastructure in the developing world -- billions of people will continue to suffer.
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Ditto on this quote.
My belief is that yes, the media will blow things out of proportion, any by any sort of ethical standards, shouldn't be allowed and certainly not be allowed to be taken seriously by people reading about it. You have to remember that most media articles written about contested theories such as this will pick out ones featuring controversial ideas, and I'm sure if it were done in an intelligent, low-key fashion, it may actually be a good place to spark genuine debate, no matter how far-fetched the idea seems. You never know, it could turn out to be true.
But also, I really don't think the scientists are at fault here, especially not from peer-reviewed journals. They print what they perceive to be true, and report it how they see it. PRJs, especially highly respected ones, are enormously difficult to get into, and rely on very hard proof that what the scientist says is true, may just in fact be true. I feel you get the growing concern for it because it's been reported on in PRJs so often, and, the fact that absolutely nothing is being done on the political end of things to perhaps look even further into the evidence and see what's truly going on. And if not bring about change specifically for global warming, then at least to remedy the things supposedly caused by and linked to global warming. I think the economy can suffer the minor hit for the potential major gain to be received from change.