Climate Scientists Rebuke Rupert Murdoch: WSJ Denier Op-Ed Like ‘Dentists Practicing Cardiology’

Rupert Murdoch owns Fox "News" and bought the Wall Street Journal several years ago. He owns papers in England which bribed police and hacked phones.

http://thinkprogress.org/green/2012/02/01/416078/climate-scientists-rebuke-rupert-murdoch-wsj-denier-op-ed-like-dentists-practicing-cardiology/

By Brad Johnson on Feb 1, 2012 at 8:10 am

In a scathing letter to the editor, thirty-eight of the world’s top climatologists have rebuked Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for its publication of a “scientist” op-ed denying the threat of manmade global warming. The letter, authored by climate scientist Kevin Trenberth and colleagues from the world’s top science institutions, tells the Wall Street Journal editors to “Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate“:

You published “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” (op-ed, Jan. 27) on climate change by the climate-science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology. While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert. This happens in nearly every field of science. For example, there is a retrovirus expert who does not accept that HIV causes AIDS. And it is instructive to recall that a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science.

The 16 climate deniers include a medical doctor, some engineers, and astrophysicists. One of the climate deniers who wrote the “No Need to Panic” op-ed, Richard Lindzen, questions whether smoking causes cancer, and another of the climate deniers, Claude Allegre, doesn’t believe asbestos is hazardous.

The climate scientists demolish the canard that global warming “stopped”:

Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record. Observations show unequivocally that our planet is getting hotter. And computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean. Such periods are a relatively common climate phenomenon, are consistent with our physical understanding of how the climate system works, and certainly do not invalidate our understanding of human-induced warming or the models used to simulate that warming.

The Wall Street Journal published the denier op-ed after rejecting a letter on the threat of manmade climate change from fossil fuel pollution by 255 members of the National Academies of Science.

Read the letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal, in full:

[...]

Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused. It would be an act of recklessness for any political leader to disregard the weight of evidence and ignore the enormous risks that climate change clearly poses. In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth. Just what the doctor ordered.


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