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Newsweek Hides Real Global Warming Agenda Lowell Ponte Overhead these next few nights, Mother Nature will be putting on her own Fourth of July fireworks show. The annual Perseid meteor showers, which peak Sunday night, will light up the skies with an average of at least one shooting star per minute. Our calendar is really a map whose days mark places that our planet passes through during its annual orbit around the sun. At the places we call August 10, 11, 12 and 13, our world splashes through the thickest part of a river of stardust deposited by a melting ancient comet whose orbit used to cross Earth's. What we see as Perseid shooting stars are bits of comet debris — most of them the density of cigarette ash and no bigger than a grain of beach sand — heated to blazing incandescence as at 90,000 miles per hour they encounter the friction of air molecules 60 miles or more above our heads. Before the dawn of science, people believed that shooting stars were messengers from heaven. A shooting star meant that a door had momentarily opened in God's realm so that these bright messengers could plunge to Earth. Any wish or prayer at that moment, ancients believed, could enter heaven and reach God's ear through that same door before it closed. Thus endures the widespread belief that we should make a wish the instant we see a shooting star.
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Scientists have unraveled the mystery of the Perseid meteor shower. For many people, white-robed scientists have become a new priesthood with the status once accorded to preachers and theologians. Genuine scientists accept no such mantle of authority. Genuine science deals not in truth with a capital "T" but in empirical data and in hypotheses that are always open to question, debate, and revision. But some who pretend to be scientific are far from genuine. They preach or practice pseudo-science, often by using bits and pieces of science to camouflage agendas that are ideological, political, power-craving and deeply dishonest. Such is the current Newsweek magazine cover story smearing scientists like MIT's Richard Lindzen who are skeptical about wild and extreme global warming claims that go far beyond what genuine science can verify. Yes, this is the same Newsweek — part of the liberal Washington Post media empire — that during the mid-1970s warned we were on the verge of a new ice age. That is one of many, many inconvenient facts deftly left out of its new leftwing global warming story.
An old adage in law, politics and debate is that when your opponent is superior to you in facts and logic, you try to win by smearing and personally attacking him and hope that onlookers do not notice how weak your facts and logic are. This is Newsweek's approach in what to this veteran journalist is the shoddiest, most unethical and dishonest cover story I've ever read in any national news magazine. To understand how disreputable Newsweek is, compare what its pseudo-science writer Sharon Begley wrote with the investigative reporting Marc Morano and I did in our July 2006 NewsMax Magazine cover story. Begley claims that since the late 1980s a "well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change" that has impeded government action. One of the first pro-warming authorities Begley quotes is non-scientist former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth, who said that the tactic of this cabal, like that of "the tobacco industry," has been to "sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress." But as we reported in NewsMax, this same Tim Wirth in 1990 said: "We're got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing — in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." Begley never reported this cynical and manipulative Wirth quote to Newsweek readers. Nor did she identify Wirth as a Democrat and an extreme liberal who believes that the "right thing" is the left thing — massive new taxes and government controls on private property and business. As Wirth's statement makes clear, the global warming issue is to him merely a means to his socialist objective. Begley also cites NASA climatologist James Hansen, describing how he warned a congressional hearing of global warming during a 1988 heatwave. But Begley neglected to tell her readers that Hansen, speaking scarcely a decade after Newsweek's alarms over a new ice age, was denounced by the overwhelming majority of fellow climatologists for exaggerating available data, as the journal Science duly reported in a news story titled "Hansen vs. the World." Begley's cover story repeatedly accuses global warming skeptics of receiving money from industry, as if this discredited their careful scientific data and analyses. But Begley never tells her readers that Hansen received $250,000 from a foundation controlled by Teresa Heinz Kerry. Hansen, a Big Government liberal, publicly endorsed her husband Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic standard-bearer, for president. Begley depicts industry as a science-corrupting special interest, but she never portrays government (from which Hansen and most other climate scientists get their money) and the United Nations as special interests manipulating scientific studies and media to expand their own revenue and power. Begley uncritically quotes spokespeople from groups such as the Sierra Club — evangelists for eco-religious dogma, not science. She never reports that they are well paid via government grants, liberal foundations, and contributions from those frightened by apocalyptic fundraising letters. More than 2,000 eco-activists each earn more than $100,000 a year by "riding" issues such as global warming. Each has a selfish motive to scare people to keep this gravy train running. Al Gore "rides" global warming out of ego, political ambition, and fanaticism. But Gore refuses to debate skeptical scientists. He smears them instead, via media hitmen like Begley. Gore is anti-scientific, extremist, deliberately dishonest and authoritarian. As to liberal Newsweek's motives, what sells magazines better than doomsday, hot or cold?
Editor's note:
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