Editor’s note: Sean Long, the author, is not related to Jane Long.
While climate alarmists and the media continue to link everything, including storms like Hurricane Sandy, to climate change, on scientist recently admitted to HuffPost Live that accuracy of forecasts is deteriorating.
Jane Long, Berkeley researcher and associate director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, cast doubt on climate change forecasts in an Oct. 29 HuffPost Live segment.
The discussion centered on climate change and future storms, like Sandy, and part of extensive HuffPost Live coverage of the Hurricane Sandy anniversary. Like the network news media, they continued to link the hurricane to climate change in the face of scientific disagreement [1].
Long said, “We’ve gotten worse … We don’t know, any more, with any more precision. We know with less precision how much warming will occur for a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. That means we can say we want to reduce by 20 percent or 80 percent and therefore, we’ll keep it under two degrees. We don’t know that.”
She still advocated reducing carbon emissions and claimed it would help. Host Josh Zepps summed up her point saying, “the predictions are getting worse rather than better.” Long referred to the declining accuracy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecasts. The left uses these models to aggressively attack opponents whom they insultingly label “climate deniers.”
When the latest IPCC report was released Sept. 27, the broadcast networks’ evening news shows on repeated the IPCC’s dire warnings without including any skeptics and without mentioning past failures such as their inability to accurately predict warming or sea level rise [2].
Long’s concession came amid claims that Hurricane Sandy was the result of climate change, a point the networks have been repeating [1] since the storm a year ago.
Zepps predicted that this information “is unfortunately likely to be used by climate science deniers to, as evidence of why we shouldn’t believe climate scientists.” Finally, an accurate prediction.
— Sean Long is Staff Writer at the Media Research Center. Follow Sean Long on Twitter. [3]