On her September 24 edition of Global Players, CNBC’s Sabine Christiansen’s notion of a balanced panel was four global warming proponents versus one global warming skeptic.
“Scientists say we are reaching a tipping point. That if we don’t act now to stop climate change, Earth will become a very different planet. Monster storms, floods, and droughts” were among the catastrophes Christiansen saw, before setting up her unbalanced panel with the question, “Are governments and companies ready to get down to business to stop it?”
While Christiansen labeled global warming proponent and NASA scientist James Hansen as the “world’s leading researcher on global warming” and her producers affixed the phrase “world’s leading climate scientist” as his title in on-screen graphics, she dismissively tagged Fred Smith as “president of the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute.”
Indeed, Smith was the sole critic of government regulation to control global warming amidst four proponents from business and academia who favored global regulation of greenhouse gases.
But Hansen’s findings are not above criticism. In fact, scientists have weighed Hansen’s latest findings and found them lacking.
“In the next few weeks, John Lyman of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will publish a paper in the refereed journal Geophysical Research Letters showing that, globally, the top 2,500 feet of the ocean lost a tremendous amount of heat between 2003 and 2005 – in fact, about 20% of all the heat gained in the last half-century,” said University of Virginia climatologist Patrick Michaels in an August 29 article [1] for the Cato Institute.
Those conclusions, the scientist added, run counter to a Hansen claim in UPI’s “Space Daily” that “Over the past ten years, the heat content of the ocean has grown dramatically.”
Rather than including Lyman, Michaels or another scientist like them on the panel, CNBC opted for a panel stacked heavily in favor of regulation.