Newsweek Fesses Up

I’ve been on vacation for the past week, so I haven’t had much opportunity to blog – but I did want to post a quick follow up to my comments on Newsweek’s cover story of a few weeks ago. It was so bad that Newsweek felt compelled to post a follow up to the story. As Robert Samuelson writes

The story’s thrust: discredit the “denial machine,” and the country can start the serious business of fighting global warming. The story was a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading.

The story was, as Sameulson puts it, “a peripheral and highly contrived story.” Too bad Barbara Boxer and Al Gore don’t agree.

Methinks They Doth Protest Too Much…

For some strange reason, the Global Warming “Alarmists” are out in force decrying the Global Warming “Deniers.” The cover story of this week’s issue of Newsweek is titled The Truth About Denial. And Al Gore was in Singapore (what was the carbon footprint of his private jet trip to Asia) proclaiming

“There has been an organized campaign, financed to the tune of about $10 million a year from some of the largest carbon polluters, to create the impression that there is disagreement in the scientific community. In actuality, there is very little disagreement… This is one of the strongest of scientific consensus views in the history of science. We live in a world where what used to be called propaganda now has a major role to play in shaping public opinion.”

If the consensus was so strong and the global warming deniers so crazy, one would think that there would be no need for such a concerted effort to marginalize the non-believers.

Let’s look at the Newsweek article. Talk about a hack job. The  article is an editorial disguised (not very well) as news. You would be hard pressed to find a more one sided article on www.moveon.org.

As the article begins, Sen. Barbara Boxer relates how after a meeting with the head of the IPCC, she was approached by a staffer who claimed that a conservative think tank funded by ExxonMobil had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the recent IPCC report. Turns out this is quite the exaggeration. In fact,while the AEI is a conservative think tank, they received $1.6 million over 7 years from ExxonMobil, less than 1% of total revenue for that time. The money was a standard honorarium offered by the AEI and in this particular case, the request was for scientists to review the latest IPCC report in light of the uncertainties highlighted in the previous IPCC report.

Another claim the Newsweek article makes is that the ExxonMobil has given over $19 million over the years to the Competitive Enterprise Institute to produce what Sen. Rockefeller called “very questionable data” on climate change. No mention of the $3 BILLION that Richard Branson has donated to “combat global warming”, or the multiple millions donated to environmental groups to spread the message of the impending doom that global warming will wreak on the world. One estimate suggests that the those who believe humans are responsible for the current warming have received over $50 Billion.

The Newsweek “article” also points out the money that certain global warming skeptics have received (specifically the $165,000 Patrick Michaels received from the coal industry), while painting global warming alarmists as impartial. For example, NASA’s James Hansen is portrayed as a level-headed climate scientist struggling to communicate the dangers of global warming. I suppose the $250,000 Hansen received from a foundation headed by Teresa Heinz Kerry (shortly before he endorsed John Kerry for president) doesn’t count.

I could go on outlining errors, exaggerations and distortions, but you get the picture.

And then there is Al Gore proclaiming that there is a conspiracy to discredit the IPCC and it’s conclusions. I was a History of Science major in college, and for Gore to proclaim that the idea of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is one of the strongest consensus in the history of science is laughable. But then again, if we aren’t all convinced that CO2 is the most evil of all gasses, how will Al sell his carbon credits?

iPhone Impressions

Well – I finally got a chance to play with the iPhone in person. It’s a slick piece of equipment – but is it worth the $600 (not including the two year commitment with AT&T)?

I did like the interface – it’s intuitive and flashy. It’s especially nice when looking at pictures and surfing the Internet. On the other hand, the iPhone I was playing with had trouble sensing when I turned the phone from vertical to horizontal. But shaking the phone when I rotated it seemed to do the trick.

As for browsing, I was disappointed. It was slow and crashed at least three times in the 10 minutes I was using it. I’m not sure if it was using Wi-Fi or the AT&T network, but I hope it was the AT&T network, otherwise the iPhone is REALLY slow. That said, why Apple didn’t have the phones using Wi-Fi remains a mystery.

Finally, as many people have already commented, the touch screen keyboard takes some getting used to. My thumbs are used to the Treo 650, and so I found that I was making more typos than usual.

I came to the conclusion by asking: “what does the iPhone do that my phone doesn’t?” And other than a cooler interface and some nice voicemail management, my answer is “not much.”  I think I’ll wait until iPhone 2.0 (or 3.0)