ABC News is giving away free advertising! Or Sam Champion is, anyway. On the June 18 edition of “Good Morning America” the weatherman-when-he’s-not-busy-saving-the-planet did his best to help DVD sales of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth,” and then proceeded to rave about Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisor’s new “Carbon Counter.” DBCCA is a commercial concern, as is Al Gore. If other members of the global warming industrial complex get wind of this, ABC may have to make good.
Champion still hasn’t gotten over Gore’s 2006 movie and explained, “It’s the movie where he stood beside this giant graphic and rose on a scissor lift … [he] showed you how our rapid rise in fossil fuels would just go off the charts in greenhouse gases,” he reminisced. But the good times aren’t over, according to Champion. “Well there’s a whole new way to count this and what it will do to our planet if we don’t make some substantial changes.”
Yes, we’ve come a long ways since Gore stood beside a graph three years ago. The electronic Carbon Counter is placed on 33rd Street and 7th Avenue in New York City, but you can download it to your computer. Above the numbers it reads: “Climate Change Affects Everyone.”
The Carbon Counter measures the metric amount of twenty-four different gases that human activity releases into the atmosphere. At the outset of Champion’s segment the Carbon Counter measured at 3,642,039,883 metric tons of gases, and the numbers quickly went up.
Champion gave no explanation for how the Carbon Counter was counting the gases released, but assured viewers that that the Counter’s numbers would keep growing and by the end of the century the earth’s temperatures may rise between 2 to 11 degrees if humans don’t “make some changes.”
What changes? “As we change the way we burn fossil fuels it will hopefully change the affects on global warming on the planet.” That’s very reassuring. Of course, Champion didn’t site any science. But why should he with the Carbon Counter in place?
Champion did eventually get to the weather after plugging the Carbon Counter, but he began the segment by stating, “We’re going to talk about the storms that are roaring through the middle of the country again today. But first a little something different.” A little different? Champion apparently forgot two days ago he warned people to think twice about retiring to Florida [1] because of global warming.
And even that wasn’t different from his usual reporting. In 2008, he spent eight minutes plugging [2] the Aspen Institute’s environmental conference. In 2007 he raved about environmentalists [3] who went without toilet paper. That same year he also questioned if one billion people [4] were going to die from global warming.
You could die of global warming just waiting for Champion to get to the weather report.