Climate change conference receives scant coverage

With the controversial global warming topic grabbing headlines almost daily, it was interesting to note that major media minimized coverage of last week’s 2008 International Conference on Climate Change that attracted about 100 speakers from around the world to New York City, observes Grumpy Editor.

Coverage was scant because the conference, which attracted about 500 people, was peppered with global warming skeptics.

Speakers ranged from Vaclav Klaus, newly reelected president of the Czech Republic to John Stossel of ABC News.

Klaus, an economist and author of a new book on environmentalism, explained his strong opposition to claims that global warming is a "crisis" that requires rapid reductions in human greenhouse gas emissions, mentions Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, a national nonprofit research and education organization that sponsored the three-day gathering.

Dr. William Gray, hurricane forecaster and pioneer in tropical meteorological research, described what he called huge errors in the treatment of water vapor by computer models used to forecast future weather conditions and pointed to evidence showing the warming predicted by the models was not occurring at the altitudes and latitudes predicted by the models, reports Bast.

Stossel “delivered a withering critique of the way the news media cover science and health issues,” continues Bast.  “While confessing to have been duped into covering alleged "crises" in the past, “he said he now recognizes that advocacy groups take advantage of the scientific illiteracy of journalists and their natural interest in stories of lurking or invisible threats that only government can protect people from,” adds Bast.

After the conference concluded, print/broadcast media --- while avoiding any mention of climate change --- were reporting on a major non-global warming event:  A heavy winter storm that walloped an area extending from Arkansas to Tennessee and down to Mississippi.

Columbus, Ohio, received more than 20 inches of snow amid blizzard conditions over the weekend, breaking the city’s previous record of 15 inches set in February, 1910.  Cincinnati and Cleveland received about a foot of snow, as did portions of Arkansas and Tennessee, while northern Mississippi saw five to seven inches of the white stuff on the ground.