Sorry Deniers, There's No Such Thing as 'Global Cooling'

Posted by Tara Lohan, AlterNet at 11:15 AM on October 28, 2009.

The latest plot by some global warming deniers is to push a bogus 'theory' that the earth is actually cooling, instead of warming. But the AP's Seth Borenstein took the hot air out of their sails. In his recent story, Borenstein explains that the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians to see what kinds of trends they found. "The experts found no true temperature declines over time," he reports. Instead, they found "a distinct decades-long upward trend," which of course has been backed up by the world's leading scientists for years.

So who's behind the global cooling charade? You may be surprised. The BBC recently ran a poorly researched news story and so did the New York Times' Andrew Revkin. But the most attention lately has come from the new book, Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The authors wrote, "Then there's this little-discussed fact about global warming: While the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased."

Since publication one of the authors has tried to explain that they were really just being ironic -- and they don't actually believe in so-called 'global cooling.' But the book is so rife with scientific errors (as Joe Romm explains in great detail) that their 'irony' just isn't a valid excuse.

Borenstein points to a better explanation from a climate scientist at the DOE's Lawrence Livermore Labs, who said it was "'a concerted strategy to obfuscate and generate confusion in the minds of the public and policymakers' ahead of international climate talks in December in Copenhagen."

Good thing that reporters like Seth Borenstein are still doing their job and actually reporting on the science. The last thing we need before Copenhagen is more media misinformation.

Tagged as: climate change, globa warming, global cooling, deniers

Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet.