http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0506/1224269791613.html The Irish Times - Thursday, May 6, 2010
A dialogue of the deaf with US climate sceptics
The Heritage Foundation persists in claiming everything we are told about global warming is not true, writes FRANK McDONALD
IT WAS up close and personal, the confrontation we had last week at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank in Washington – 12 European environmental journalists facing four of its policy wonks, all of them working assiduously to thwart President Barack Obama’s efforts to curb American carbon emissions.
In many ways, it was a dialogue of the deaf. Heritage’s position on climate change, as Ben Lieberman put it, is that “virtually everything we’re told about it is not true”. According to him, there has been no increase in temperatures since 1995. “The curve is flat,” he said. A bit like the Earth, maybe?
When I put it to him that the World Meteorological Organisation had identified the past decade as the warmest since records began, followed closely by the 1990s, Lieberman dismissed these findings as “grossly exaggerated” – even though they were grounded in scientific measurements taken all over the world.
This head-in-the-sand approach is reminiscent of the Birthers, a daft grassroots movement that believes Obama has no right to be president because he “wasn’t born in the US”. It simply doesn’t matter that he has a birth certificate from Hawaii and can point to a contemporaneous birth notice in one of the local papers.
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