Fortunately, most people will likely be watching the Giants-Packers game Sunday evening, and will therefore miss the one-sided hysteria.
However, for those that mysteriously don't switch channels after the Chargers-Patriots game, CBS will offer a special about global warming this Sunday instead of "60 Minutes."
How marvelous.
The CBS News website hysterically described this installment of "The Age of Warming":
A fascinating new liberal defense mechanism has arisen in the past couple of years: Whenever you want to dodge criticism, just claim you are being swift-boated.
In fact, this has become such a part of political parlance that Microsoft Word now recognizes the term "swift-boated" without highlighting it as errant. Isn't that special?
With that in mind, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, is claiming that recent accusations made about him - that he was involved in a GISS report in 1971 predicting an ice age, and that he received money from multi-billionaire George Soros - are nothing more than swift-boating by his critics.
Of course, folks who offhandedly use this defense seem to forget that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) actually never proved that any of the claims made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were false.
Similarly, in Hansen's case, though he admirably tried to deflect scrutiny, he also failed to thoroughly refute the claims made against him (emphasis added, h/t NB reader M. Hoff):
As NewsBuster Jake Gontesky reported, an editorial in Investor's Business Daily Monday claimed one of billionaire leftist George Soros's foundations gave $720,000 in 2006 to the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen.
Since this editorial was published, according to LexisNexis and Google News searches, not one major media outlet has reported these allegations.
Maybe even more shocking is that had press outlets looked into this matter - you know, acted like journalists instead of advocates! - they would have found Hansen's name prominently mentioned in the 2006 Soros Foundations Network Report (relevant section on page 123):
Since NASA's James Hansen finally released computer codes related to how climate data are collected and adjusted, anthropogenic global warming skeptics around the world have been waiting to see what a scientific examination of this information would produce.
On Monday, Canada's Steve McIntyre, who himself debunked Michael Mann's ridiculous "Hockey Stick" theory as well as identified Hansen's Y2K bug, released information identifying that Hansen recently made additional changes to climate data akin to how companies like Enron used creative accounting to exaggerate earnings and defraud investors.
As published at Climate Audit moments ago (emphasis added, h/t Anthony Watts):
Much as when the organization he leads quietly made changes to the United States historical climate record at the prodding of Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre, James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies finally released critical computer codes scientists have wanted for years, but did so with absolutely no official press release.
As a result, not one media outlet covered this occurrence that years from now could be seen as a huge turning point in the climate change debate.
Despite the secrecy, there was great celebration amongst anthropogenic global warming skeptics that have wanted these closely held codes to be able to identify how NASA and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration make adjustments to raw climate data collected by weather stations.
One such skeptic is Anthony Watts, who happily reported Saturday (emphasis added):
NASA's James Hansen, whose work is continually exposed as shoddy while he refuses to share data gathering techniques and computer codes used for such things with others, has been criticized by a contributing scientist to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as moving "dangerously away from scientific discourse to advocacy."
What has drawn the ire of Andrew Weaver, a physicist at the University of Victoria who works on the dynamics of the polar ice caps, are recent statements by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies chief that oceans could rise as much as 82 feet in the next hundred years due to global warming.
Bear in mind that the IPCC's most recent report downgraded its expectations for such sea level increases to less than two feet.
However, according to Canada's Globe and Mail, Hansen believes the IPCC is dramatically underestimating the imminent doom (emphasis added throughout, h/t to Marc Morano and James Lewis):