Global Warming No Hoax but Semenuk Is

Swarthmore's Geoff Semenuk writes the Daily Times to correct perceived errors in a recent editorial on global warming.

Semenuk points out that Steve McIntyre, the man who discovered that NASA's measurements of the hottest U.S. years on record were off, is not a climatologist. He's a former mining exec who has taken an interest in global warming science. Semenuk is correct.

Past that, it is Semenuk who is "wrong" when it comes to some of his own assertions.

While giving McIntyre credit for discovering NASA's error, which caused NASA to quietly, and embarrassingly, recalculate its figures, Semenuk dismisses the significance of "tiny correction."

For years Al Gore has been saying the hottest year on record was 1998. It wasn't. According to NASA's recalculated figures it was 1934.
In his movie, An Inconvenient Truth Gore asserted that nine of the ten hottest years in U.S. history occurred since 1995.

No matter, says Semenuk, scientists still agree that 10 of the hottest years on record world-wide have occurred between 1989 and 2006.

This isn't "changing the script"?

Semenuk went on to write:

"Printing an editorial like this, that implies that global warming is myth rather than fact, is extremely irresponsible."

But the editorial said or implied nothing of the kind.

Having pointed NASA's error, we stated flatly, this "does not mean that global warming isn't happening or that it is not a serious and important issue."

How is that implying global warming is a "myth?"

Semenuk is no climatologist either. He's the associate director of Alumni relations at Swarthmore College and a member of Swarthmore's borough council. That makes him no more professionally qualified to weigh in on this subject than anybody else.

We are all entitled to our own opinions when it comes to the seriousness of the problem of global warming and what we should do about it.

But we are not entitled to misstate and misrepresent what other people are saying about it.

Not without being called on it.