Patrick McIlheran regularly cites the work of known liars to advance his point of view. (Iraq war cheerleader Amir "Iran is making Jews wear yellow stars" Taheri for starters.)
Why should anyone be surprised he would do so with his writing on global warming?
Last week Paddy Mack approvingly cited a column by the National Post's Terence Corcoran that claimed the the IPCC was tweaking its results to match up with their recommendations.
Any knowledgable Paddy Mack reader knows that his "experts' are suspect. And, thanks to the power of google. one swiftly finds Corcoran is in this camp.You might say he, like Paddy, has a history of misrepresenting science and fact to match up with his ideological imperatives.
From desmogblog.com (9/18/06) (Brawler's bolds):
Thanks to the National Post's Terence Corcoran for finding this story in the New Scientist magazine. It's an interesting report on new research into the role of the sun in global warming during the 20th century.
Corcoran's reportage, however, is another example of the lengths to which he will go to mislead people about the science of climate change.
Here's what Corcoran says:
"The science behind the idea of man-made global warming, always theoretical and often speculative, appears set to receive another blow. A report in New Scientist magazine yesterday chronicles the work of a crew of scientists who forecast a new wave of global cooling brought on by a decline in activity in the sun."
Here's what New Scientist says:
'None of this means that we can stop worrying about global warming caused by emissions into the atmosphere. "The temperature of the Earth in the past few decades does not correlate with solar activity at all," (Sami) Solanki (of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany) says. He estimates that solar activity is responsible for only 30 per cent, at most, of the warming since 1970. The rest must be the result of man-made greenhouse gases, and a crash in solar activity won't do anything to get rid of them.'
Corcoran, in his flagrantly deceptive article, uses this (nearly correct) quote from the New Scientist piece.
'Sam Solanki ... says declining solar activity could drop global temperatures by 0.2 degrees Celsius. "It might not sound like much," says New Scientist writer Stuart Clark, "but this temperature reversal would be as big as the most optimistic estimate of the results of restricting greenhouse-gas emissions until 2050 in line with the Kyoto protocol."
But the NP Business Page Editor neglects to include this:
"Global average temperatures have risen by about 0.6 °C in the past century, and until recently almost all of this has been put down to human activity."
To his credit, Corcoran includes this:
'The New Scientist says this gives the Earth some breathing room in the face of climate change over the next 50 years, but it warns against complacency. "If the Earth does cool during the next sunspot crash and we do nothing [about man-made global warming], when the sun's magnetic activity returns, global warming will return with a vengeance," says Leif Svalgaard of Stanford University in California."'
But Corcoran immediately dismisses that as "one man's view."
In short, McIlheran's reputed expert is just another bullshit artist. And, if history is any guide, McIlheran will refer to him again. So here's a link to a catalog of Corcoran's crimes.
One would hope that McIlheran's two years of reporting experience would have taught him to determine whether your sources are reliable and whether they're misrepresenting information. Either he never learned this lesson, or he doesn't care.
In either case, this is just the latest incident that forces one to ask: How is this man qualified to be a columnist for a major American daily newspaper? Doesn't the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel think its readers deserve better?
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