The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Bottom Stories of the Day
“Bin Laden Endorses Bomb Attempt on US Plane”–headline, Associated Press, Jan. 24
Picasso Collides With a Woman–Now That Would Be News
“Woman Collides With a Picasso”–headline, New York Times Web site, Jan. 24
Man Bites Dog–Now That Would Be News
“Dog Bites Firefighter Who Rescued It From LA River”–headline, Associated Press, Jan. 22
The Continuing Global-Warmist Crack-Up
London’s Mail on Sunday reports on the latest climate-science scandal:
The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.
Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: “It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.
“It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.”
London’s Times, meanwhile, reports that the IPCC’s head, Rajendra Pachauri, “admitted that there may have been other errors in the same section of the report”:
“I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I’m in no mood to oblige them,” he told The Times in an interview. “It was a collective failure by a number of people,” he said. “I need to consider what action to take, but that will take several weeks. It’s best to think with a cool head, rather than shoot from the hip.”
The Sunday Times turns up more errors:
The United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.
It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny–and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link [was] too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.
But politicians have picked up on these false claims:
Ed Miliband, the [British] energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods–such as those in Bangladesh in 2007–could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”
We are supposed to believe the politicians when they warn us about global warming because they have the authority of scientists behind them. The more we learn, however, the more it seems that scientists are merely playing politics.
The Science and Technology Committee of Britain’s House of Commons is now investigating the University of East Anglia emails, with an eye to answering the crucial question: “What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?” When will Congress follow suit?
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
