Michael Jensen
The Weather Channel Speaks
By
Nov 28, 2007 - 3:10:00 PM

John Coleman has been a TV weatherman since he was a college freshman in 1953.  He was worked as a meteorologist in Illinois, Nebraska, and Wisconsin, and was the weatherman on “Good Morning America” for seven years.  He now works for KUSI News 6 in San Diego, California, what he calls his “retirement job.”

He is also the creator of the The Weather Channel, which he spent six years developing and ran for the first year of its existence.  This guy knows a little something about weather.

Coleman also writes a blog.  One of his recent blog entries was so strong that I emailed him to ask if I could use it in its entirety in my column.  He agreed.  Therefore, I present to you word for word (with editing only to keep it under my allowed word length), John Coleman’s take on global warming:

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled, and highly offended by it. Global warming: It is a SCAM.

I do not oppose environmentalism. I do not oppose the political positions of either party.

However, global warming, i.e. climate change, is not about environmentalism or politics. It is not a religion. It is not something you “believe in.” It is science; the science of meteorology. This is my field of life-long expertise. And I am telling you global warming is a nonevent, a manufactured crisis and a total scam. I say this knowing you probably won’t believe me, a mere TV weatherman, challenging a Nobel Prize, Academy Award, and Emmy Award-winning former Vice President of United States. So be it.

I suspect you might like to say to me, “John, look, the research that supports the case for global warming was done by research scientists; people with Ph.Ds in Meteorology. They are employed by major universities and important research institutions. Their work has been reviewed by other scientists with Ph.Ds. They have to know a lot more about it than you do. Come on, John, get with it. The experts say our pollution has created an strong and increasing greenhouse effect and a rapid, out of control global warming is underway that will sky rocket temperatures, destroy agriculture, melt the ice caps, flood the coastlines and end life as we know it. How can you dissent from this crisis? You must be a bit nutty.

Allow me, please, to explain how I think this all came about. Our universities have become somewhat isolated from the rest of us. There is a culture and attitudes and values and pressures on campus that are very different. I know this group well. My father and my older brother were both Ph.D-University types. I was raised in the university culture. Any person who spends a decade at a university obtaining a Ph.D in Meteorology and become a research scientist, more likely than not, becomes a part of that single minded culture. They all look askance at the rest of us, certain of their superiority. They respect government and disrespect business, particularly big business. They are environmentalists above all else.

And, there is something else. These scientists know that if they do research and results are in no way alarming, their research will gather dust on the shelf and their research careers will languish. But if they do research that sounds alarms, they will become well known and respected and receive scholarly awards and, very importantly, more research dollars will come flooding their way.

So when these researchers did climate change studies in the late 90s, they were eager to produce findings that would be important and be widely noticed and trigger more research funding. It was easy for them to manipulate the data to come up with the results they wanted to make headlines and at the same time drive their environmental agendas. Then their like minded Ph.D colleagues reviewed their work and hastened to endorse it without question.

There were a few who didn’t fit the mold. They did ask questions and raised objections. They did research with contradictory results. The environmental elitists berated them and  brushed their studies aside.

I have learned since the Ice- Age-is-coming scare in the 1970s to always be a skeptic
about research. In the case of global warming, I didn’t accept media accounts. Instead I read dozens of the scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct when I assure you there is no runaway climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. It is all a scam, the result of bad science.

I am not alone in this assessment. There are hundreds of other meteorologists, many of them Ph. Ds, who are as certain as I am that this global warming frenzy is based on bad science and is not valid.

I am incensed by the incredible media glamour, the politically correct silliness, and rude dismissal of counter arguments by the high priest of global warming.

In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious. As the temperature rises, polar ice cap melting, coastal flooding, and super storm pattern all fail to occur as predicted everyone will come to realize we have been duped.

The sky is not falling. And natural cycles and drifts in climate are as much, if not more, responsible for any climate changes underway.

I strongly believe that the next twenty years are equally as likely to see a cooling trend as they are to see a warming trend.

So ends Mr. Coleman’s blog.  Bravo, John Coleman.


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