In his June 3 column, Rocky Mountain News media critic and Independence Institute research director Dave Kopel criticized the News and The Denver Post for “exaggerat[ing] the degree of scientific certainty regarding global warming issues” and “presenting a skewed and misleading perspective on the scientific data.” Kopel went on to tout the work of “many ... global warming skeptics whose views are rarely presented by journalists who claim to speak on behalf of 'scientists.' ”

A Colorado Media Matters examination found that after Kopel's column was published, numerous other Colorado commentators also touted the views of the small minority of global warming “skeptics.” These commentators frequently made false and misleading claims in their effort to challenge the overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue, including falsely labeling as “skeptics” scientists who actually are not; misstating existing scientific data; and repeating long-debunked clichés about former Vice President Al Gore.

As Media Matters for America has noted, in its 2001 “Third Assessment Report,” the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that it is “very likely” (defined in the report as a 90-percent to 99-percent chance) that “the 1990s was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in the instrumental record (1861-2000).” Citing multiple studies that provided “evidence for an anthropogenic signal [indication of human influence] in the climate record of the last 35 to 50 years,” the IPCC stated: “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.” Similarly, a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report commissioned by the Bush administration found that greenhouse gases are “causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise” and that "[t]he changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities." Media Matters has further noted that a June 22 National Academy of Sciences report affirmed the “scientific consensus regarding human-induced global warming,” based on multiple lines of evidence supporting “the conclusion that human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming” of the Earth.

William Gray: “eminent expert” on global warming?

In his column, Kopel touted the views of Colorado State meteorology professor emeritus and global warming skeptic William Gray. Kopel accused The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News of “little noting the evidence presented of eminent experts such as William Gray” and of “presenting a skewed and misleading perspective on the scientific data” on global warming. Following Kopel's column, Rocky Mountain News columnist and radio show host Mike Rosen, Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi, and Boulder Daily Camera columnist Bob Greenlee all cited Gray -- who frequently describes global warming as a “hoax” -- in their columns challenging the scientific consensus.

Kopel criticized The Denver Post for not reprinting a May 28 profile of Gray by Washington Post Magazine staff writer Joel Achenbach. Noting that Gray is a hurricane expert often cited by the Post and the News in relation to hurricane forecasts, Kopel also wrote that “in the News and Post combined, one can find only a few paragraphs even mentioning Gray's analysis of global warming.” But to the extent that The Denver Post and the News have not given greater voice to Gray's views on global warming, it may be due to the fact that Gray is apparently not considered to be an “eminent expert[]” on the subject.

Though Kopel's readers would not know it, the same Washington Post Magazine profile of Gray that he cited in his column contained significant information that calls into question Gray's supposed expertise on global warming. For instance, Achenbach reported that “when you press him [Gray] on his theory of how thermohaline circulation has caused recent warming of the planet and will soon cause cooling, he concedes that he hasn't published the idea in any peer-reviewed journal. He's working on it, he says.”

As Achenbach noted in The Washington Post Magazine, the weblog Real Climate -- produced by scientists who support the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by human activities -- “recently published a detailed refutation of Gray's theory, saying his claims about the ocean circulation lack evidence. The Web site criticized Gray for not adapting to the modern era of meteorology, 'which demands hypotheses soundly grounded in quantitative and consistent physical formulations, not seat-of-the-pants flying.' " According to Achenbach, “The field [atmospheric science] has fully embraced numerical modeling, and Gray is increasingly on the fringe.”

Criticism of Gray's global warming “theory” has not been limited to supporters of the scientific consensus on global warming. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of meteorology Richard S. Lindzen -- whom Achenbach described as the global warming skeptic with “probably ... the most credibility among mainstream scientists” -- said of Gray: “His knowledge of theory is frustratingly poor.” Gray himself told Achenbach, “I have nobody really to talk to about this stuff.”

According to Achenbach, Gray also asserted that Gore -- whose recent documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount Classics, May 2006), highlights the scientific consensus on global warming -- “believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews.” (Gray his since reportedly expressed regret for this comment.)

On June 5 -- two days after Kopel's column ran -- Harsanyi touted Gray's views, writing that "[t]he only inconvenient truth about global warming, contends ... Gray, is that a genuine debate has never actually taken place." Harsanyi quoted Gray as stating, “They've been brainwashing us for 20 years. ... Starting with the nuclear winter and now with the global warming. This scare will also run its course. In 15-20 years, we'll look back and see what a hoax this was.” Harsanyi added, “So next time you're with some progressive friends, dissent. Tell 'em you're not sold on this global warming stuff.”

In his June 9 column, Rosen included Gray among a group of “expert climatologists, meteorologists and astrophysicists” who, Rosen said, are "[d]isputing the alarmists and scaremongers."

And in his June 18 column in the Daily Camera, Greenlee touted Gray's declaration that "[g]lobal warming is one off the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people."

Mislabeling scientists as global warming “skeptics”

In their attempts to challenge the scientific consensus of human-induced global warming, Harsanyi and Kopel both mislabeled other scientists as “skeptics,” even though there was ample available background material to the contrary at the time they published the misinformation.

As Colorado Media Matters has noted, in his June 5 Denver Post column, Harsanyi mischaracterized the views of Colorado state climatologist Roger A. Pielke Sr. After noting Gray's claim that global warming is a “hoax,” Harsanyi wrote that Pielke “is also skeptical.” But while Pielke publicly has questioned some widely accepted conclusions about climate change, he definitively stated in a June 5 post on his weblog -- in a direct rebuttal to Harsanyi's column -- that “the term 'climate skeptic' inaccurately describes my perspective on climate change.” Pielke went on to state that he is “not skeptical of a substantial human forcing of climate change including the subset of climate change that is referred to as 'global warming'!” Harsanyi could have learned from a similar mischaracterization that occurred nearly a year earlier in The New York Times: That newspaper corrected an August 23, 2005, article after Pielke strongly criticized it on his blog.

Similarly, in his June 3 column, Kopel listed Cato Institute senior fellow Patrick J. Michaels as one of “many ... global warming skeptics” despite the fact that a May 28 Washington Post article that Kopel cited in his column noted Michaels “doesn't even want to be called a skeptic.” The Post article quoted Michaels as saying: “I believe in climate change caused by human beings. ... What I'm skeptical about is the glib notion that it means the end of the world as we know it.”

Smearing Al Gore

Several Colorado media figures have resorted to a discredited conservative cliché to attack the arguments about global warming presented by Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. As Colorado Media Matters has noted, Greenlee falsely claimed in his June 18 Daily Camera column that Gore “once claimed he had 'invented the internet,' ” and film critic Reggie McDaniel falsely stated on the July 7 broadcast of KOA's The Mike Rosen Show that Gore “said he invented the Internet, so how much do you trust --.” Additionally, in his June 9 Rocky Mountain News column, Rosen wrote that if global temperatures fall in the near future, “expect 'Internet' Al Gore to take credit for it.”

However, for years it has been an established fact that Gore never claimed to have “invented the Internet.” Rather, in a March 9, 1999, interview with CNN host Wolf Blitzer, Gore accurately stated: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”

Declan McCullagh, the Wired News reporter who apparently originated the myth that Gore “claimed to have invented the Internet,” ultimately acknowledged in an October 17, 2000, Wired article that “Gore never did claim to have 'invented' the Internet.”

In an October 5, 2000, Salon.com article, Scott Rosenberg reported that Gore had been correct in stating that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet”:

But the defense of Gore currently underway feels to me less like a party-line effort than like the repayment of a debt of gratitude by Internet pioneers who feel that Gore is being unfairly smeared.

That's what you'll hear from Phillip Hallam-Baker, a former member of the CERN Web development team that created the basic structure of the World Wide Web. Hallam-Baker calls the campaign to tar Gore as a delusional Internet inventor “a calculated piece of political propaganda to deny Gore credit for what is probably his biggest achievement.”

“In the early days of the Web,” says Hallam-Baker, who was there, “he was a believer, not after the fact when our success was already established -- he gave us help when it counted. He got us the funding to set up at MIT after we got kicked out of CERN for being too successful. He also personally saw to it that the entire federal government set up Web sites. Before the White House site went online, he would show the prototype to each agency director who came into his office. At the end he would click on the link to their agency site. If it returned 'Not Found' the said director got a powerful message that he better have a Web site before he next saw the veep.”

Moreover, as noted by Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler weblog, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) acknowledged in a September 1, 2000, speech that “Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet.”

“Most of the warming in the 20th century was in the period between 1900-1940”

In his June 9 column, Rosen stated, “The only documentable 'truth' that can be known is that mean global surface temperatures increased about a half-degree Celsius between 1850 and 1940 and by another 0.3 degrees since then. Most of the warming in the 20th century was in the period between 1900-1940, when man-made greenhouse gases were considerably less influential.” Rosen's statement is misleading because it ignores the fact that the years 2001-2005, while not part of the 20th century, were five of the six warmest years on record. The other was 1998. According to an analysis of “global-mean surface temperature[s]” last revised January 12 by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “It is no longer correct to say that 'most global warming occurred before 1940' ”:

Record warmth in 2005 is notable, because global temperature has not received any boost from a tropical El Niño this year. The prior record year, 1998, on the contrary, was lifted 0.2°C above the trend line by the strongest El Niño of the past century.

Global warming is now 0.6°C in the past three decades and 0.8°C in the past century. It is no longer correct to say that “most global warming occurred before 1940”. More specifically, there was slow global warming, with large fluctuations, over the century up to 1975 and subsequent rapid warming of almost 0.2°C per decade.

Recent warming coincides with rapid growth of human-made greenhouse gases. Climate models show that the rate of warming is consistent with expectations. The observed rapid warming thus gives urgency to discussions about how to slow greenhouse gas emissions.

Blaming solar activity

Rejecting the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is responsible for observed increases in global temperature in recent years, several conservative columnists have suggested that fluctuations in solar activity may be to blame. In his June 18 Daily Camera column, after denying that human activity is the “primary culprit” behind recent warming, Greenlee stated that “the facts appear to be inconclusive and may simply demonstrate the normal changes that occur in solar activity that then produce changes in ocean currents and other natural processes.” Similarly, in his June 29 column attacking Gore's documentary, Grand Junction Daily Sentinel columnist Gary Harmon asked: “And why is Mars warming? And Jupiter? And what would the sun going through a hot phase have to do with any of those things? What of these inconvenient truths?" Neither Greenlee nor Harmon offered any evidence to back up their suggestions that recent global warming may be caused by solar activity.

In his June 9 News column, Rosen asserted that "[t]he dominant cause of climate change, dwarfing human activity, is solar activity." To support his claim, Rosen wrote that a “Russian scientist, Khabibulo Absudamatov, predicts that a decrease in the sun's radiation, beginning in 2012, will cause global temperatures to decline into the middle of the 21st century.” Rosen may have relied on a February 6 article on the MosNews.com website titled, "Russian Expert Predicts Global Cooling from 2012" that described Absudamatov as an “expert from the Russian Sciences Academy Observatory.” The MosNews article was touted by several conservative websites, including that of the Media Research Center's Business and Media Institute, which linked to the article on February 7.

A February 8 article in the British newspaper The Express quoted Absudamatov as saying on February 7 that "[g]lobal warming is by no means an anomaly, but a natural phenomenon that occurs about every 200 years." The Express noted that Absudamatov warned that Britain “could be plunged into a new Ice Age within six years.” According to The Express, Absudamatov “based his predictions on a study of the fluctuations in solar radiation which influence our climate.”

The Express did not name the “study” to which Absudamatov was referring, but his observations that global warming is solely a natural phenomenon based on solar fluctuations conflict with the findings of several significant sources. In its “Third Assessment Report,” the IPCC examined whether changes in solar activity might be responsible for recent warming. The IPCC found that all the studies it analyzed suggested a substantial “rise in solar forcing during the early decades of the 20th century” but not in recent decades. According to the IPCC, “Such a forcing history is unlikely to explain the recent acceleration in surface warming, even if amplified by some unknown feedback mechanism.” The IPCC's reports are issued by several hundred climate experts representing “universities, research centers, business and environmental associations and other organizations from more than 100 countries.”

As Media Matters has noted, a 2004 study conducted by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research similarly concluded that solar activity contributed little to the dramatic warming over the last few decades. As a press release by the parent organization of the group that conducted the study explained that, according to the study, “the Sun can be responsible for, at most, only a small part of the warming over the last 20-30 years” and that “the Earth's temperature has risen dramatically in the last 30 years while the solar brightness has not appreciably increased in this time.” A July 2005 study led by Raimund Muscheler of the National Center for Atmospheric Research agreed with the Max Planck Institute study that “solar activity reconstructions tell us that only a minor fraction of the recent global warming can be explained by the variable Sun.”

Antarctic ice sheet

In his June 29 Daily Sentinel column criticizing An Inconvenient Truth, Harmon asked, "[B]y way of Antarctica, why is it the central ice pack of the world's coldest place is thickening? How does that happen?" Harmon's question echoes a misleading claim advanced by the conservative-leaning Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which, as a March 19 Washington Post article reported, “widely publicizes its belief that the earth is not warming cataclysmically because of the burning of coal and oil [and] says Exxon Mobil Corp. is a 'major donor.' ” CEI's claim -- and Harmon's question -- regarding the Antarctic has been answered by Professor Curt H. Davis, the scientist who conducted the study to which Harmon was apparently referring. Davis, who directs the University of Missouri-Columbia's Center for Geospatial Intelligence, has said that such thickening in central Antarctica is a “predicted consequence of global climate warming,” which he has said was “due to increased precipitation.”

In May, CEI released a television ad questioning the scientific consensus about global warming and stating, “Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution; we call it life.” Citing the study led by Davis, the CEI ad stated: “The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner.” But as Think Progress and Media Matters have noted, Davis “refut[ed]” CEI's “misrepresent[ation]” of his work in a May 19 press release. Davis called the ad “a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate” and accused CEI of “selectively using only parts of my previous research to support their claims.” The press release further stated:

Davis said that three points in his study unequivocally demonstrate the misleading aspect of the CEI ads.

- His study only reported growth for the East Antarctic ice sheet, not the entire Antarctic ice sheet.

- Growth of the ice sheet was only noted on the interior of the ice sheet and did not include coastal areas. Coastal areas are known to be losing mass, and these losses could offset or even outweigh the gains in the interior areas.

- The fact that the interior ice sheet is growing is a predicted consequence of global climate warming.

“It has been predicted that global warming might increase the growth of the interior ice sheet due to increased precipitation,” Davis said. “All three of these points were noted in our study and ignored by CEI in a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public.”

Touting the “Oregon Petition”

In his June 9 column, Rosen referred to “the 17,000 signatories to Dr. Arthur Robinson's Petition Project, who said of the Kyoto Accord: 'There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate.' ”

Robinson's so-called "Oregon Petition," drafted in 1998, “urge[d] the United States government to reject” the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to limit the production of greenhouse gases in an effort to curb global warming. The petition further stated that “there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

As Media Matters has noted, however, many of the signatures on the petition apparently belong to people who are not climate experts. According to the website PR Watch, “When questioned in 1998 ... Robinson admitted that only 2,100 signers of the Oregon Petition had identified themselves as physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, or meteorologists, 'and of those the greatest number are physicists.' ” According to a May 1, 1998, Associated Press article, the petition at one time included the names of “Drs. 'Frank Burns' 'Honeycutt' and 'Pierce' (Remember the trio from M*A*S*H?), not to mention the Spice Girl, a.k.a. Geraldine Halliwell, who was on the petition as 'Dr. Geri Halliwel' and again as simply 'Dr. Halliwell.' ”

The petition was sponsored by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM), which, according to PR Watch, describes itself as “a small research institute” studying “biochemistry, diagnostic medicine, nutrition, preventive medicine, and aging.” Robinson, who founded OISM, was the lead author of a paper accompanying the petition. The paper asserted that the effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide are “a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution.” The AP reported on April 30, 1998, that Robinson is “a physical chemist” who “acknowledges he has done no direct research into global warming.” The New York Times reported on April 22, 1998, that the paper “was printed in a format and type face similar to that of the academy's own journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” According to the Times, the NAS's governing board subsequently issued a statement clarifying that the paper “does not reflect the conclusion of expert reports of the academy.”

Also circulated with the petition was a letter from Frederick Seitz, the former president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). In his June 3 Rocky Mountain News column, Kopel referred to Seitz as one of “the many ... global warming skeptics whose views are rarely presented by journalists who claim to speak on behalf of 'scientists.' ”

Seitz's letter warned that "[t]he United States is very close to adopting" the Kyoto Protocol, which, according to Seitz, “would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds.” Seitz added that “there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.” A June 5, 2000, item in Business Week reported that "[f]or 28 years, Seitz was also a paid director and shareholder of Ogden Corp., an operator of coal-burning power plants that stands to lose financially should the Kyoto Protocol become law." Business Week reported that Seitz “sold most of his 11,500 shares” of Ogden in 1999 -- after promoting the petition in 1998.