The iceberg treatment

By Russell Cook

A huge iceberg started breaking away from Greenland in the first few days of August. Rather than restrict his comments about how this is one more thing proving global warming, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA, chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming) felt compelled to add a bit more:

"An iceberg four times the size of Manhattan has broken off Greenland, creating plenty of room for global warming deniers to start their own country ...it's still unclear how many giant blocks of ice it will take to break the block of Republican climate deniers in the U.S. Senate who continue to hold this critical clean energy and climate legislation hostage."

Skeptic blogger Anthony Watts has already named the iceberg "Deniersberg."

We could simply laugh at this, if only the far greater problem Markey personifies weren't so serious: anyone who questions the idea of man-caused global warming needs to go someplace where they can't be heard. That would include ordinary citizens just like me.

I'm not a climatologist, nor do I have any background in science. I simply saw a PBS Nova/Frontline program back in 2000 called "What's Up with the Weather?" (Transcript here), which seemed to present the issue in a reasonably balanced format. Combined with a few other reports about the skeptics' side I'd heard, I was fully expecting to see such balanced reporting on PBS' NewsHour. Ultimately, that never happened, and the amount of bias I noted in my 7/29 American Thinker article "The Left and Its Talking Points" has only increased since I expanded my search at their web site beyond their Environment archives. I now count 230 on-air segments (and related online reference pages) containing global warming discussion, yet the number for segments with usable amounts of skeptic science discussion remains at three.

This overall total includes the most recent broadcast, August 9, 2010, in which Margaret Warner and two writers lament the death of the Climate Bill, "What Happened to Democrats' Energy, Climate Change Legislation Plans? " Give someone on the NewsHour staff credit for allowing my comments and another's to appear online about that segment's lack of balance in their blog roundup of the broadcast.

But will they answer my criticisms? Or would they prefer for me to go live on a Manhattan-sized iceberg with GOP Senate climate deniers?