31 May 2001 Truth is First Casualty in the Environmental Movement’s War Against Bush

Bulletin Board: Newsbreaking new releases and statements from conservatives in Washington.

In "Myth of the Martyred Mapmaker" the Washington Post tells an amusing, if cautionary tale: That of website mapmaker Ian Thomas, who was fired after he posted a map on a U.S. Geological Survey website showing caribou migration patterns in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Environmental groups and some elected officials took up his cause, claiming the Bush Administration fired Thomas for taking a position different than theirs on ANWR oil drilling.

In fact, says the Post, Thomas was fired by liberal Democrats and not by Bush, and for reasons unrelated to oil drilling.

All this placed a substantial amount of figurative egg on the faces of officials at the Sierra Club, Endangered Species Coalition, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and other groups, all of which championed Thomas as a victim of Bush without first researching his case. But two days after the Post expose’, a Sierra Club website was still making this claim: "Ian Thomas was fired from his job as a cartographer for the US Geological Survey. His offense? He posted a scientific map, the result of months of project reasearch, on the USGS website. The map showed the primary calving areas of the porcupine caribou within Ian’s area of research. The problem? The area in question is a part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, long a target for oil company exploitation and drilling. Our new president and his big oil advisors don’t plan to tolerate being balked on this issue, not even by science. Ian Thomas is one of the first casualties of the War on the Environment sponsored by the new Bush administration."

Senators John Kerry and Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and John Tierney (D-MA) were among the public officials taken in by environmentalist propaganda on this one. They wrote to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton expressing concern that "this severe and sudden action may have a chillinbg effect on scientists in the Department who may fear that their job is in jeopardy if they publish findings that are counter to the Administration’s positions."

The cautionary part of this tale: Sometimes environmentalists don’t stick to the facts. Even when, as in the case of this May 21 Post article, the truth is pointed out to them. Policymakers would do well to remember this the next time they hear from environmentalists on ANWR.

Proof that too many regulations can be harmful to your health: A new study by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons finds that a whopping 66.2 percent of doctors say they will "retire from active patient care at a younger age than they would have considered five years ago" because of increased government interference in the practice of medicine.

64 percent also cited "decreased control" over medical practices and the cumbersome Medicare bureaucracy — themselves regulatory matters — as additional reasons for early retirement.

61 percent said an increased fear of unwarranted government investigation into their compliance with laws and regulations was a factor inclining them toward retirement.

56 percent said decreased fees were a factor in their consideration of early retirement.

For more information, see "Physicians Burn Out on Regulations" by Jon Dougherty on the AAPS website at http://www.aapsonline.org/aaps/press/burnout.htm (Editor’s Note: link did not function as of 11/6/01).

If you want the straight dope about the seriousness of the alleged global warming problem, beware of television news.

So concludes a Media Research Center study finding that TV news routinely ignores the many prestigious scientists questioning the global warming theory while giving generous coverage to theory proponents.

The study, "Clamoring for Kyoto: The Networks’ One-sided Coverage of Global Warming," examined 51 global warming stories that aired on ABC’s "World News Tonight," the "CBS Evening News," CNN’s "Inside Politics," the Fox News Channel’s "Special Report with Brit Hume" and the "NBC Nightly News."

With the exception of Fox, the networks were overwhelmingly supportive of environmentalist claims that human-induced global warming is underway and will threaten the planet if steps aren’t taken to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Among the MRC’s key findings:

1) Views that man-made global warming will cause catastrophic climate change received six times as much media attention as the views of scientists who doubt this.

2) Networks gave Kyoto supporters more than twice as much airtime as was given to supporters of Bush’s decision to reject Kyoto.

3) There were only seven references to the fact that some scientists are skeptical that human actions are causing global warming.

While gloom-and-doom coverage makes for dramatic headlines, it grossly misrepresents the level of scientific skepticism about global warming.

For instance, TV news rarely mentions that over 17,000 scientists signed a petition stating: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of… greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere."

What TV news also doesn’t tell the public is that alarmist global warming reports frequently cited by the media as scientific support for the dangers of warming do not reflect a consensus of scientists.

Dr. Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a participant in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN panel whose conclusions are most often given as support for the global warming theory, accuses the UN entity of issuing dramatic statements that he and other IPCC participating scientists do not support.

For example, the IPCC recently announced that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations." But Lindzen says that statement is scientifically indefensible – there may not have been any significant warming over the last 60 years and such warming that did occur was "inconsistent with greenhouse warming."

For more information, see National Policy Analysis #337: "Kyoto Coverup: TV News Gives One-Sided View On Global Warming" by John Carlisle at https://nationalcenter.org/NPA337.html or visit the Media Research Center at http://www.mrc.org.*