Global Warming: How Worried?

I know global warming is real. But how much does the MSM distort facts in order to frighten us into leaving Iraq and shifting resources into an Al Gore-led, global climate control regime?

I read the TIME cover story, “Be Worried, Be Very Worried” (4.3.06). I quickly ran into two alarmist-leaning factual distortions that, for me, put the whole enterprise into question.

From TIME:

just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft.

Here’s the source summarized at the EPA website:

Two new climate modeling studies reported in the journal Science (24 March 2006, pp. 1747-53) suggest that global sea level could rise faster than previously thought. . .[T]eams of researchers used evidence gathered from corals and sediments of sea level changes during the last interglacial period (approximately 130,000 years ago) to reconstruct and model how sea levels might respond to a warming climate over the next 140 years. Their simulations suggest that the climate in Greenland could become as warm by 2100 as it was during the last interglacial. . . lock[ing] in conditions leading to an eventual sea level rise of as much as 20 feet in the coming centuries. . .

The researchers emphasize that without a more complete understanding of the mechanisms behind the recent increase in glacial flow, predictions of future sea level rise rates are uncertain. But current trends do suggest that ice sheets may be more sensitive to a warming climate than previously thought, and that sea level rise could proceed at rates up to 3 feet per century.

Comment: 20 foot sea rise by 2100 or 3 foot? TIME’s carefully worded misimpression boosts the near-term danger by 17 feet!

From TIME:

in the past 35 years the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has doubled while the wind speed and duration of all hurricanes has jumped 50%.

Here’s the source summarized at the EPA website:

The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has increased by 80 percent worldwide during the past 35 years, according to a study in the 16 September 2005 issue of Science (vol. 309, pp. 1844-1846). Hurricanes in these two highest storm categories, with winds of 135 miles per hour or greater, now account for roughly 35 percent of all hurricanes, up from around 20 percent in the 1970s. . . But the researchers found no global long-term trend in the overall number of hurricanes, and the total number of hurricanes per year has actually declined in most of the world since the 1990s, at a time when sea-surface temperatures have risen the most. Furthermore there was no increase in the intensity of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, just an increase in their number.

Comment: “Doubled” or 80% more? And TIME fails to mention, even though the world’s sea-surface temperatures are rising, that the total number of hurricanes is declining and that Category 4 and 5 hurricanes have failed to increase in intensity.