Rocky , Gazette silent on power-industry memo containing nearly identical wording to Rosen's misleading column on global warming

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

Both the Rocky Mountain News and The Gazette of Colorado Springs neglected to report on an Intermountain Rural Electric Association memo that called for member utilities to “support the scientific community that is willing to stand up against” global warming “alarmists,” even though both newspapers previously ran a column that contained nearly identical wording.

Both the Rocky Mountain News and The Gazette of Colorado Springs neglected to report on a July 17 Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA) memo that called for member utilities to “support the scientific community that is willing to stand up against” global warming “alarmists.” The memo reported that IREA “contributed $100,000” to Patrick J. Michaels, a prominent critic of many widely held scientific views on global warming. As noted by the weblog Real Climate, parts of the IREA memo contained wording nearly identical to a misleading June 9 column by Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Rosen that appeared in both the News and The Gazette. Despite running Rosen's June 9 column, the News and The Gazette did not print articles about the IREA memo. By contrast, The Denver Post, ABC News, the Associated Press, Reuters, and other news media have covered it.

The memo was written by Stanley Lewandowski Jr., the general manager of IREA, and highlighted IREA's efforts to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming. Those efforts included funding Michaels, who is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute.

According to The Denver Post, “Lewandowski's letter said IREA gave Michaels $100,000 and that other utilities he had contacted had pledged additional contributions.” As Media Matters for America has previously noted, a number of scientists have criticized Michaels's work. For example, in comments made to the Senate Republican Policy Committee in June 2003, Harvard University professor John Holdren said that Michaels “has published little if anything of distinction in the professional literature, being noted rather for his shrill op-ed pieces and indiscriminate denunciations of virtually every finding of mainstream climate science.”

As Colorado Media Matters has noted, a May 28 Washington Post Magazine article reported that Michaels “doesn't ... want to be called a skeptic” of global warming. The Post Magazine 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.”

In a review of Michaels's Cato Institute-published book, Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media (September 2004), Publishers Weekly noted that Michaels “acknowledges that the earth is warming because of anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but he insists that the warming will probably be modest and that nature and humanity will easily adjust to it.”

Publishers Weekly further reported:

[Michaels] sometimes allows his own agenda to intrude. Advocates of the precautionary principle will note that he fails to demonstrate his claim that “there is no known, feasible policy that can stop or even slow these climate changes.” And while he chalks up global warming alarmism to an unholy alliance of climatologists hungry for grants and media sensationalism, his remedy for biased science is not better science but a “wider source of bias” in the form of more funding of climatology by the fossil fuel industry.

As Media Matters for America has noted, an October 11, 2005, Seattle Times article reported that “Michaels has received more than $165,000 in fuel-industry funding, including money from the coal industry to publish his own climate journal.”

The Denver Post also reported that "[s]ome IREA customers also raised concerns about the contribution." According to the Post, one IREA customer, Laura Embleton, said, “I think spending $100,000 to shore up a policy position when they haven't talked to the members is a problem. ... I think that's a pretty good sizable budget that they could be using to create better infrastructure.”

ABC News reported on July 27 that Ron Binz, a public utility consultant who was the state of Colorado's utility consumer advocate from 1984 to 1995, called IREA's funding of Michaels “outrageous” and “an abuse of authority.” Binz said, “Intermountain is a rural electric cooperative. ... The customers are member-owners. Stan Lewandowski is basically spending other people's money.”

Parts of the IREA memo contained nearly identical wording to a June 9 column by Mike Rosen criticizing the scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming. Lewandowski apparently used a number of the examples offered in Rosen's column as evidence that global warming is not caused by human activity. As Colorado Media Matters previously has noted, many of the claims Rosen advanced in his column -- including several of those that appeared in the IREA memo -- were misleading.

From the July 17 IREA Memo:

From the June 9 Rosen News column:

Disputing this contention are climatologists, meteorologists and astrophysicists like Richard Lindzen, William Gray, Fred Singer, Roy Spencer, Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling, and Craig Idso and 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.”

Disputing the alarmists and scaremongers are expert climatologists, meteorologists and astrophysicists like Richard Lindzen, William Gray, Sallie Baliunas, Fred Singer, Hugh Ellsaesser and Roy Spencer, or 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.”

Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and other atmospheric scientists, noted that the effects of atmospheric water vapor on global temperatures overwhelm the impact of carbon dioxide and other gases released by human activity.

Another dissenter is Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who notes that the effects of atmospheric water vapor on global temperatures overwhelm the impact of carbon dioxide and other gases released by human activity.

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.

The dominant cause of climate change, dwarfing human activity, is solar activity. Another 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. If that happens, expect “Internet” Al Gore to take credit for it.

Global temperatures increased about a half-degree Celsius between 1850 and 1940 and another 0.3 degrees since then.

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.

The U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates human activity is responsible for just 7 billion metric tons of global carbon dioxide emissions out of a total of 157 billion tons released annually. That's just 4.5 percent, with 57 percent coming from oceans, 19 percent from decaying vegetation and 19 percent from plant and animal respiration.

The U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates human activity is responsible for just 7 billion metric tons of global carbon dioxide emissions out of a total of 157 billion tons released annually. That's just 4.5 percent, with 57 percent coming from oceans, 19 percent from decaying vegetation and 19 percent from plant and animal respiration.

Trendy global warming theory suffers from the great conceit that human activity has a significant impact on climate change.

Trendy global warming theory suffers from the great conceit that human activity has a significant impact on climate change.

Economist Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, concluded that, “implementing Kyoto will cost $150 billion to $300 billion globally every year, merely to postpone the temperature rise by six years from 2100 to 2106. It's a very expensive way to achieve very little.”

Economist Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, concluded in 2001 that, “implementing Kyoto will cost $150 billion to $300 billion globally every year, merely to postpone the temperature rise by six years from 2100 to 2106. It's a very expensive way to achieve very little.”