ABC: Scare Tactics Good When Used by Liberals on Global Warming

March 2nd, 2006 1:32 PM

The same media that joins the Democrats in accusing the Bush administration of using terrorism to scare the American people, seems to think scare tactics are okay when used to support a liberal agenda. On Thursday's Good Morning America, ABC's Bill Blakemore, for the second time in the past two months, used a one-sided story in an attempt to create paranoia about global warming.

When Blakemore fear-mongered about global warming on the January 11th GMA, he linked warming to a potential massive extinction of species around the world: "One study calculates within 45 years between 18 and 35 percent of Earth's plant and animal species will be extinct or committed to extinction because of global warming."

Later he added, "It's not just the plants and animals. The journal Nature has also brought out a study that shows global warming is now causing every year 150,000 human deaths more than we had before global warming and 5 million more cases of disease because the new temperature is encouraging the spread of diseases that are carried by insects and microbes in the groundwater."

Diane Sawyer: "Good heavens, I'm sure that's controversial. If true, it's electrifying."

Sawyer was right to be a little skeptical on that claim. A study by Thomas Moore, the Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, found that global warming would actually lower deaths in the United States by 40,000 per year and lower medical costs by $20 billion annually, but GMA viewers never heard that side of the story.

On the March 2nd GMA, Blakemore found another global warming story to highlight: "For the first time ever scientists have confirmed that the Earth is melting at both ends. They've long predicted that up in the Arctic global warming would start to melt Greenland's two mile thick ice sheet, but scientists have been predicting and hoping that the far more massive ice sheet covering Antarctica would actually increase in the 21st Century. Yet, the new measurements find that despite the increasing snowfall that comes with global warming Antarctica’s ice sheets are losing far more than the snow is adding."

Blakemore perhaps accidentally offered a glimpse of his liberal agenda. Blakemore, "(James) Hansen (Director of NASA Earth Sciences) calculates that if we start cutting greenhouse gases within the next ten years then sea level rise may be kept to as little as ten feet, slowly over the next two or three centuries. But if we don't he says, sea level rise could ultimately reach 80 feet and be well underway."

By offering "cutting greenhouse gases" as a solution, Blakemore asserts that global warming is caused by man. But scientists and anyone with Internet access or an encyclopedia can find that the Earth was significantly warmer millions of years ago. That warming wasn't caused by dinosaurs driving around in SUVs.