An Inconvenient Truth: Fact-Checking is a Bother

As an archaeologist, I had to deal with evidence of historical climate changes on a daily basis, so I've always tended to regard all the hype about global warming with a good deal of skepticism-- especially when the press takes global warming as a given. The world's climate certainly is changing. I'd be very surprised if it wasn't. However, the notion that this time the Earth is on the road to resembling a rotissieire chicken (ummm... chicken) and that manmade CO₂ emissions are to blame I find unconvincing and not enough to warrant the sort of doom-mongering that former vice-president Al Gore has been indulging in lately. And it certainly doesn't help when the only "inconvenient truth" is his lack of fact-checking. Climate change is so complex a phenomenon, the computer models used to support the global warming hypothesis so crude, and the evidence still so contradictory that a lot more work needs to be done before silly story ideas like this one from ABC News deserve any response more serious than James Lileks'.

ABC news has asked viewers to send in evidence of global warming. How is it affecting your life? ABC news wants to hear from you. This is like Life magazine asking readers in 1952 to describe the communists under their beds. Bald? Slavic? Ruddy? Drunken? Well, I can help. Naked hairless blistered ocelots prowl my yard; mutated day-bats flutter around the eaves, and the other day a polar bear got up on two legs and pushed around a fume-belching two-stroke-engine lawn mower as some sort of ironic protest. Although it may have been the neighbor mowing the lawn with his shirt off. Also, water levels are down around Jasperwood. The top tank on the Oak Island Water Feature is down an inch every morning, and while I might suspect the repair crew managed to puncture the new liner while replacing the stones, I suspect methane emissions are to blame. To do my part I will cork the dog’s hinder, since today he finished processing a bratwurst that fell on the floor, and my stars. Fire in the hole, indeed. Even the dog got that expression Curious George had when he broke the bottle of ether.