U.S. Senate Comittee majority calls Tom Brokaw biased on environment


Does an upcoming documentary on the Discovery Channel gloss over any disagreements about global warming? I haven't seen it yet, but this press release is disquieting.
Semi-regular reader Wadard alerted me to the Discovery Channel documentary on global warming that is coming up. It looks like my concerns may be justified. This is from a press release from the majority side of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works.

Unfortunately, viewers should not expect a scientifically balanced view of the climate from the former NBC newsman. Brokaw who has been affiliated with the Sierra Club and has recently lavished praise on former Vice President Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth.” Brokaw, who called Gore’s film “stylish and compelling”, has called the science behind catastrophic human caused global warming ‘irrefutable.” Brokaw also chose to ignore all 60 scientists who wrote to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in April of 2006 questioning the science of climate alarmism.

Brokaw’s partisan environmental credentials are so firmly established that the former anchor was offered a job in the Clinton-Gore Administration to be the director of the National Park Service in 1993. According to The Washington Post, Brokaw ‘very seriously’ considered the offer at the time but decided to remain with NBC News. "I have a lot of friends in the environmental movement,” Brokaw said. Brokaw’s wife also serves as vice president of the environmental group Conservation International.

In his new Discovery Channel special, Brokaw does not disclose the potential and known biases of the scientists he chose to feature.

For example, Brokaw presents NASA’s James Hansen as an authority on climate change without revealing to viewers the extensive political and financial ties that Hansen has to Democratic Party partisans. Hansen, the director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, received a $250,000 grant from the charitable foundation headed by former Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz.

Subsequent to the Heinz Foundation grant, Hansen publicly endorsed Democrat John Kerry for president in 2004, a political endorsement considered to be highly unusual for a NASA scientist.

Hansen also has acted as a consultant to Gore's slide-show presentations on global warming, on which Gore’s movie is based. Hansen has actively promoted Gore and his movie, even appearing at a New York City Town Hall meeting with Gore and several Hollywood producers in May.

Hansen also conceded in the March 2004 issue of Scientific American that the use of “extreme scenarios" to dramatize climate change “may have been appropriate at one time” to drive the public's attention to the issue --- a disturbing admission by a prominent scientist.

Obviously I haven't seen the documentary yet, but from appearances this looks like the scientists are carefully selected, opposing views (if mentioned at all) will be discredited because of partisan or other connections, all while the "good" scientists are exempt from that same treatment.

This is being sold as a fair and balanced look at global warming. This is the double standard, and it is certainly part of why I have a hard time taking the global warming arguments seriously.

Here is the test. Make it a drinking game if you want. Of the scientists shown in the documentary, which side has more? Which side has more time on camera? And which side (if any) is discredited?

In all fairness, this is the press release from the majority on the committee.

Hat tip Greenie Watch.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Thu - July 13, 2006 at 04:23 AM  Tag


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