Networks Hype Eroding Beaches, Breaking Icebergs
To demonstrate that global warming is supposedly causing the collapse of nature, the March 26 “CBS Evening News” featured eroding coastlines causing people to lose homes in England as evidence.
“Much of the effects of climate change have been couched in terms of if or when its effects will be felt,” CBS correspondent Mark Phillips said. “Well, here there is no if. And when is now. So choices are being made. It’s called managed retreat. Some areas of coastline deemed indefensible are being abandoned. Climate change is producing winners and losers, and Diana Wrightson and the others here have already lost.”
Happisburgh has become a poster child for the global warming alarmist movement. A February 22 Associated Press story referred to Happisburgh as an example of a coastline “vulnerable” to the effects of global warming.
“Across Britain, the expected rise in sea levels and storm surges that experts attribute to global warming means that some vulnerable coastal areas just are not worth defending any more,” AP reporter Thomas Wagner wrote.
But blaming global warming as the cause of the deterioration of coastlines may be an oversimplification, according to Dr. Boris Winterhalter, retired Senior Marine Researcher of the Geological Survey of Finland.
“To state that sea level rises or falls due to global change is completely out of proportion,” Winterhalter said on his Web site. “There are far too many factors affecting this planet from the inside and the outside to warrant the idea that man is capable of influencing these natural processes.”
Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, agreed.
"This story is nonsense from start to finish," Monckton told the Business & Media Institute. "As a result of continuing isostatic recovery following the recent end of the last Ice Age (about 9,000 years ago), the western half of the
Monckton continued, "The loss of coastal properties in eastern England, which began occurring long before we could have had any appreciable influence on the climate, has nothing to do with rising seas and everything to do with falling land. But stories like this are constantly peddled by the leftist media, who have no regard whatsoever for objective truth."
The March 26 “NBC Nightly News” also warned of dangers caused by global warming – specifically melting icebergs in Antarctica causing sea levels to rise.
“Scientists are astounded at the size of the breakup, plus the fact that it’s happening much sooner than they had anticipated,” NBC correspondent George Lewis said. “They say that eventually collapses like this will raise ocean levels around the planet, that there may not be much we can do to stop it.”
However, according to Dr. Duncan Wingham, Professor of Climate Physics at University College London, you can’t blame melting ice in Antarctica for rising sea levels. He contends Antarctic ice is actually expanding. Wingham and his colleagues found that 72 percent of the ice sheet covering the entire land mass of Antarctica is growing at the rate of 5 millimeters per year.
“That makes Antarctica a sink, not a source, of ocean water,” Wingham said in a story published in February 2007 in the Canadian newspaper, The National Post (included in a December 2007 U.S. Senate Report, “Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007”).
Related Links:
Special Report from BMI: Global Warming Censored
BMI's Special Report "Fire & Ice: Journalists have warned of climate change for 100 years, but can't decide weather we face an ice or warming"
Climate of Bias: BMI's page devoted entirely to global warming and climate change in the media
