You highlight articles titled
“Fears of Melting Polar Ice Are Discredited,” “Record April Freeze Hits U.S.” (!), “Scientists Urge Gore to Cool His Global Warming Rhetoric,” and “When Will We Tire of the Fear Mongers?” What specific facts in these articles are “misinformation?” If you cannot identify any factual errors, then you need to replace your term “misinformation” with the term “scientific debate” or, at worst, “opinion.” For an educated man to denigrate scientific studies and scientific facts as “misinformation” simply because it casts doubt on a faith-based belief in alarmist global warming is quite troubling.

Indeed, did not a record April freeze hit the U.S. this year? Are denying this?

Did not the New York Times publish an article with the theme that mainstream climate scientists feel Al Gore has exaggerated the science? Are you denying that the New York Times published such an article?

Did not scientists at the University of Edinburgh and University College London recently report that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are affecting sea level “by 0.35 millimeters per year,” which equates to just an inch per century? Do you deny that such scientific findings were made?

Since when do scientific facts become labeled “misinformation?” Are you a denier, Marc?

I have often wondered how a “computer climate model” can tell us how “bad” its going to be in 100 years when weatherman and climate scientists can’t predict whether its going to rain tomorrow or not. The entire “consensus” is based off of the UN’s IPCC. That organization is relying on the computer climate models for their predications. Thats right I said predictions. That is what they are.

I believe we should all be concerned with the environment, but I am not willing to risk America’s way of life on a climate model in which results vary by up to 20 feet in sea levels.

Should we take climate change seriously, yes!

Finally, I have often wondered why everything today is being attributed to global warming. If its to cold its because of global warming, or a tornado, or a flood, etc… I also wonder why individuals think that the temperature today on the earth is optimal. Looking back on the earth’s history the temperature has gone up and done many times. Why do we assume that it will stay this way and that this temperature is the optimal or perfect temperature for the earth? I am just not buying into it.

I like debate and I want to see more people stand up and provide reason and sound science to refute people with wild emotional exagerations in an effort to turn back the hands of time to a pre-industrial age.

Marc in the future could you please provide som balance to your pieces. I know its hard for most journalists to try to move to the center on things but if you haven’t noticed most of America is right of center!

Beyond that, I’d argue that one can believe in liberty and free markets and still be concerned about the impact of global warming, which has the potential to destroy both.

I also find it hard to believe, as you suggest. that GE, Wal-Mart, Texas-based oil company Conoco Phillips, Goldman Sachs, Caterpillar and too many other companies to list here are bending with the “political winds” on the climate change issue. Yes, some like GE will benefit by selling eco-friendly products. But I am not nearly as cynical about big business as you are–the idea that they see this only as a profit-making opportunity and that they don’t believe the science is, quite frankly, ridiculous. You call them all hypocrites. Do you really believe that all the CEOs of those companies lack integrity? It’s a curious position to take for a defender of capitalism.

Even ExxonMobil says climate change is an issue worth taking seriously. Are they “alarmists” and “enviro-extremists”, too?

If you wanted to learn about capitalism, would you ask Stalin for source material? If you were a reporter who wanted to write an at-least-nearly-objective article about Judaism, would you go to Joseph Goebbels for your lessons? If you wanted to write about gay rights or contraception, would you look to the Christian Coalition for unbiased information?

I presume the answer to these questions is no, which leads me to wonder why you would to go Greenpeace for information about the global warming debate. Greenpeace is a group that uses “climate deniers” in the way that others talk about “holocaust deniers”, implying both the scientific and historical accuracy of their opinion as well as a similar significance of the issue, all of which are false.

Greenpeace is a group which has become so radical that Patrick Moore, a founder of the organization, has abandoned it, noting that Greenpeace and other extremist organizations are anti-science, anti-trade, anti-capitalism, and generally naïve.

As for the Heartland Institute (which I served on the Board of Directors of some years ago), they get less than 5% of their income from the energy industry, unlike Greenpeace which receives millions of dollars from far left wing organizations and recently reported over $18,000,000 in gross income in their most recently published annual report. While I am no long privy to Heartland’s exact financials, I would guess that Greenpeace takes in somewhere between 5 and 10 times the money that Heartland does.

Additionally, one must remember that for global warming alarmists, their mission is some combination of a business and a religion. Anyone who disagrees, or even questions their dogma, is a heretic. It reminds me greatly of the Catholic Church of centuries past refusing to admit that they might be wrong about the sun revolving around the earth, or of others steadfastly believing that the earth is flat. I suppose the first metaphor is more appropriate since the penalty for disagreeing with their dogma was anything from censure to imprisonment to death. There is no doubt in my mind, after hearing these alarmists foam at the mouth, equating “climate change deniers” to holocaust deniers, etc., that they would muzzle and punish us skeptics if they could.

One reason that Heartland and a few other courageous groups go out of their way to deny the existence of a consensus on “global warming” is because there isn’t one. Not only are Al Gore, John McCain, Tony Blair, and the great intellectual Leonardo DiCaprio factually wrong to say that “the debate is over”, but their position is very dangerous given that their policy prescriptions amount to aiming a gun at the economic heart of the industrialized world in a quixotic chase for a fraction of a degree over a century.

Heartland, CEI, and those other groups are doing us a great favor by standing up to the enviro-extremists because if they had their way, the entire world (but especially the industrialized world) would suffer tremendously.

As for the US Climate Action Partnership, as a financial reporter you can’t possibly believe that those companies are doing what they’re doing because they believe in global warming as a real threat. No, they are doing it because they see which way the political winds are blowing. It is all about helping design the rules of the next game so they can extract as much extra profit from it as possible. Of course, any former Board member of Heartland such as myself must be a full-blooded capitalist, and I am. But capitalism is based on providing value to customers and creating a mutually beneficial voluntary exchange whereas what these companies are doing is posturing to use government to extract money from taxpayers and redirect it to them. Why do you think Lehman Brothers has jumped in so aggressively? They want to create and rig the market to their benefit, and when you have a government willing to go along with it, it’s hard to blame these companies…but I still do. No, they are not tree-huggers. They are worse than tree huggers, because tree-huggers while often wrong in their policy preferences are at least not hypocrites.

[For an interesting article about a CEO who hasn’t caved in to the political winds, see this article:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010098
And for just one example of many about others speaking out against the widely-spreading cult of global warming alarmism, here’s a good short article from New Zealand:
http://www.stuff.co.nz//timaruherald/4064691a6571.html

If Exxon funds skeptics in this debate, it would be because the risks to their customers and shareholders make it worth that funding. Don’t forget, Al Gore is the guy who wanted to add dollars to gasoline taxes. Greenpeace and friends hate, and I do mean hate, technology and the modern industrialized world. If making fuel so expensive that the economy grinds to a halt is what it takes to achieve their anti-capitalist goals, they are perfectly fine with that. Meanwhile, those of us who would want to buy fuel from Exxon will be paying $5 or $10 per gallon, while the guys at BP who have bought political favor by joining the cult of global warming early on will be siphoning off our tax dollars.

As for “part of the solution or part of the problem”, in this case there is a policy in search of a problem. Humans are not likely to be a substantial cause of global warming. CO2 concentrations lag temperature changes rather than leading them. The policy suggestions of Al Gore, Kyoto, the Stern Report, etc., amount to economic suicide. A business reporter should know better than to let a big business like Greenpeace manipulate you into uncritically accepting their marketing.

Mr. Gunther, you should be ashamed of letting Greenpeace use you as a propaganda tool for them. You should be ashamed of your weak attempt to tarnish Heartland’s position on climate change by talking about ties to “the tobacco industry”, as if they were somehow related. The only relevant way in which they are related is that Heartland has demonstrated an ability and willingness to stand for liberty and free markets even when they are unpopular.

Heartland and Exxon deserve our thanks, and your readers deserve better than this Greenpeace editorial from someone representing himself as a reporter.