Fred Barnes Repeats Junk Science Talking Point Issued by Big Oil
Reported by Janie - May 24, 2006
Fred Barnes, who is known to repeat every right wing talking point he hears without discrimination, did so again last night (5/23) during the "All Star Panel" on Special Report with Brit Hume; this time on behalf of Big Oil.
During the segment, which was used to bash Al Gore's new documentary An Inconvenient Truth (you can find the release date closest to you here), Fred Barnes claimed, "They're [glaciers] melting in some places, it's getting colder in Greenland."
The claim that Greenland is getting colder is quite misleading, and comes from an advertisement released to directly counter Gore's film, which was issued by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a group funded by none other than ExxonMobile.
The ad, which bases its claim on a recent study, claims that “Greenland’s glaciers are growing.”
According to Think Progress:
"Actually, the study (by Johanessen et al.) found that there was an increase in snow accumulation on Greenland’s interior. Meanwhile, other studies show that glaciers are thinning on Greenland’s coastal regions. This is exactly what you’d expect as the earth gets warmer. The climate scientists at realclimate.org explain:
'However, Johanessen et al. were not able to measure all of the coastal ranges. Indeed, the thinning of the margins and growth in the interior Greenland is an expected response to increased temperatures and more precipitation in a warmer climate. These results present no contradiction to the accelerated sliding near the coasts.'"
Barnes merely repeated the garbage the far-right wing and Big Oil are using to discredit Gore's film, because the truth for them really is too inconvenient.
