The Demonization of Global Warming Skeptics

A spokesman for Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe stepped on a few toes at a global warming conference in Kenya:

Kenya (AP) - A spokesman for the U.S. senator who described global warming as a hoax showed up at a gathering of believers Tuesday, claiming scientific dissent on the issue was being suppressed and demonized.

One scholar shot back that the Senate aide must be living on another planet. The exchange took place at the UN conference on climate change, which has drawn more than 5,000 diplomats, activists and scientists to consider new steps in combating global warming.

"The skeptics who get vocal are vilified," said Marc Morano, director of communications for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The committee chairman, Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, has enraged environmentalists by calling global warming alarmist and a hoax.

Morano was invited to be part of a panel discussion on how best to convey the issue of climate change in the media. His fellow panelists, including Jules Boykoff of Pacific University in Oregon, argued that skeptics actually get too much attention in the press.

Efforts by journalists to create "balanced" stories on global warming allow "a handful of skeptics . . . to be treated as equals to thousands of scientists," said Boykoff, an assistant professor in the department of politics and government.

Liisa Antilla, a geographer and scholar of global warming, said it was wrong for journalists to "frame climate science as uncertain."

And the myth goes on. A "handful of skeptics", which of course isn't true. There are a lot of skeptics in the scientific community, none of the least of which is William Gray, the nation's foremost authority on hurricanes.

So what's a good global warming proponent to do if after all the hysteria there are still vocal skeptics? Why, ratchet up the rhetoric of course, which is why Kofi "Oil for Food" Annan had this to say about global warming:

UN chief Kofi Annan demanded that world leaders give climate change the same priority as they did to wars and to curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. ...

And he lacerated the fast-shrinking minority of politicians or scientists who still denied there was any threat as "out of step, out of arguments and out of time."

You'll notice the writer of the article didn't put quotes around "fast-shrinking", meaning that those words are his own editorial opinion, which of course has no business being in a news article. So much for unbiased reporting.