You just have to laugh. Mike, Dana, and some other guy named Rick Piltz, get face-time on Al Jazeera and the best they can do is cite “false balance” and “tobacco disinformation campaigns” to bolster their weak 97% argument? Of course, no skeptics were present, since even a 3% appearance time would be a “false balance” by their reckoning. Mann of course is famous for not debating skeptics, and running away when faced with the prospect of sharing TV time with a skeptic.
Mike and Dana, don’t you find it a bit hypocritical that you use an instrument of “big oil” (Al Jazeera is founded and funded by the government of Qatar, which owns the state controlled Qatar Petroleum with earnings of $51.6 billion in 2011) to push your ideas?
Video follows.
Some quotes from the broadcast
There is a false balance of media coverage where two or three percent of skeptics get close to 50 percent of the media coverage because the media feels that they have to show a balance where they are showing both sides of the issue. But in the process they are giving that two or three percent 50 percent of the coverage and actually creating a false balance and false perception that there is a big divide among climate experts about the cause of global warming. – Dana Nuccitelli
and…
“The disinformation campaign can only survive for so long. We saw, as in the case of tobacco, there was a similar disinformation campaign decades ago to obscure the science and the scientific link between the use of tobacco products and lung cancer. But eventually the truth of what the science had to say became accepted. There are some positive signs that we are moving in that direction; the rest of the world is moving increasingly towards renewable energy …. We are lagging behind but we are slowly making progress ourselves.” -Michael Mann
The premise of their 97% claim, when you inspect the data from their project, doesn’t even hold up, and thus they are perpetrating lies of omission in addition to these tired propagandized talking points.
The big oil funded slur is so often trotted out with total impunity I continue to be pretty gobsmacked by it. It seems extremely absent to me. Do people correlate this obvious bullshit with the remainder of the assertions of CAGW? b
Both video’s in the comment stream are almost identical; warmists talking to themselves and wondering why “the public” doesn’t agree with them…it must be the big bad fossil fuel industry and their disinformation campaigns! Not the “Reality Drops” and the “consensus” websites…..doh?!
Does this site get better numbers? Olberman is long gone. He was the number 1 show. So 47,000 is a good target. Depending on the day the show was on counts too. Friday thru Sunday cable news channels have lower ratings.
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If it was not for Olbermann’s show, which averaged a total of 177,000 viewers per night, Current TV likely would have missed Time Warner Cable’s viewership benchmark, said one of the sources.
The appointment of Spitzer, another outspoken news commentator, led to speculation among Time Warner Cable executives that Current is courting controversy to attract viewers.
Based on the 47,000 total viewers who tuned into the initial broadcasts of Spitzer’s “Viewpoint,” the source said that “just enough people are tuning in to keep Current over the quota.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/05/us-currenttv-timewarnercable-idUSBRE83404P20120405
GlynnMhor;
The obsession probably comes from the need to reinforce rationalization of the massive disinformation campaign that sold the “second-hand smoke menace”.
Man oh Man
I could only take 7 minutes or so of this one sided diatribe to give up on it. Balanced debate my eye ! Give me a break.
I do admire Al Jazeera’s presenter for his Prince Charles’ish British accent, well done, but unfortunately a real turn off to those of us that were born in Blighty but don’t speak like him Old Son.
Tobacco, “global warming” and Al Jazeera. Spot the common factor. Yes, that’s right: Al Gore.
[snip. Sounds like you’ve had a bad day. — mod.]
Learn how to debate The Inquirer. Your comment is without both meaning and any purpose.
Wasn’t Mann being represented by a “big tobacco” lawyer for one of his suits?
TheInquirer says:
May 19, 2013 at 2:19 am
“This site descends further into twisted bitterness and irrelevance by the hour.”
Well the traffic rank declined over 2 years from 20,000 to 30,000. But I guess that just shows the decline of global warming as a news item. Shall we look at, hm, skepticalscience? They’re somewhere beyond 100,000 so they barely show up in Alexa’s graph:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/skepticalscience.com
Same for realclimate.
I think Dana and Gavin will not be amused by your assessment of their relevance.
Sorry, can’t stop it: Ouch that’s gotta hurt! Al Gore’s Climate reality Project, Traffic Rank 404958:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/climaterealityproject.org
If he continues rising in popularity he will have managed to become as well known as Pierre Gosselin’s notrickszone in three months!