Meanwhile, Over at The Trib...

With all the attention being focussed on the G20 stuff going on dahntahn, I still wanted to make sure to keep an eye on the Trib's editorial board. Make sure they didn't slip something in under the radar.

But if you're looking for G20 coverage, go check out Potter's Slag Heap or Pittsburgh Indymedia or even the P-G. Looks like things are, thankfully, peaceful. In fact Schmitz, Roddy, Templeton, et al. posted on the calm at 12:27 this afternoon:

Downtown Pittsburgh was quiet, almost eerily so, today, with street closures and a massive police presence, but no private vehicles and not many pedestrians.

Bram (of the Pittsburgh Comet) spent sometime dahntahn today and in an e-mail to be wrote that:

Downtown is boring ass hell. Bicyclists kind of have it made, but for the most part its troops and troops of bored looking security officers.

There were a pair of small protests together, Save Ethiopia and Save Burma, but nothing radical. It's just quiet and boring and IMPOSSIBLE to get from point A to point B. Even the security officials are confused and run into dead ends all the time.

(UPDATE: Obviously things on the ground have changed.)

In the meantime, Richard Mellon Scaife's brain-trust/editorial board was up to its old tricks. Take a look:

The first casualty of "climate change" rhetoric continues to be the truth.

Take, for instance, President Obama's speech to the United Nations on Tuesday. Myron Ebell, the noted director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, documents at least four misrepresentations:

Interesting how Scaife's crew continues to project it's own bias onto that which it criticizes. But let's start with Ebell. While the board takes care to note that Ebell is "noted" they don't actually say what he's noted for - other than being a policy director for the CEI.

Did you know that Ebell isn't a scientist? How do I know that? It says so in a Vanity Fair artcle about him published in 2007:

Though he likes to bash scientists for working outside their degreed fields, Ebell, it turns out, isn't a scientist at all. He majored in philosophy at the University of California in San Diego, then studied political theory at the London School of Economics and history at Cambridge

And how do we know that Vanity Fair got it right? A few paragraphs later the article quotes Ebell:

"I'm not claiming to be a climate authority the way Jim Hansen is, or Robert Corell," says Ebell. "Every interview I do, when I'm asked about scientific issues, I say I'm not a climate scientist."

And this is the guy Scaife's brain-trust is using to counter climate science - setting aside, of course, the fact that the CEI is yet another conservative funded think tanks.

But let's look at Ebell's specific charges. The Trib writes:

The president said the threat is "serious," "urgent" and "growing." But Mr. Ebell notes that global mean temperatures increased only slightly from 1977 to 2000 and have been "flat" since then.

Now take a look at what actual real honest to goodness scientists at NASA have to say:

Calendar year 2008 was the coolest year since 2000, according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies analysis of surface air temperature measurements. In our analysis, 2008 is the ninth warmest year in the period of instrumental measurements, which extends back to 1880. The ten warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008. The two-standard-deviation (95% confidence) uncertainty in comparing recent years is estimated as 0.05°C, so we can only conclude with confidence that 2008 was somewhere within the range from 7th to 10th warmest year in the record.

But things haven't been warming. Let's look at some data. Here's a chart from NASA:

I guess "slightly" to Ebell and The Trib translates to about .5 of a degree Celsius. But look at that last decade. It DOES look like it's "leveled off" doesn't it?? Left out of The Trib's spin is what NASA said, that the 10 warmest years on record all occurred after 1997.

Leveled off? Perhaps, hotter than ever? Definitely.

The scientists at NASA said so. The philosophy major at the oil company funded think-tank disagrees. Who would you trust?