Last week, AP writer Seth Borenstein penned a story on Global Warming entitled “Obama left with little time to curb global warming“.  The story was an extremely over the top alarmist piece that Hot Air call a global-warming wet kiss (my vote for the coolest quip of the year).

For the record, our below-zero days usually come in January and February, not December.  It looks as though we will have a second long, cold winter in a row.  That’s what makes this report from the AP so ludicrous:

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can’t avoid. …

Mother Nature, of course, is oblivious to the federal government’s machinations. Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it’s thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.

The average global temperature in 2008 is likely to wind up slightly under 57.9 degrees Fahrenheit, about a tenth of a degree cooler than last year. When Clinton was inaugurated, 57.9 easily would have been the warmest year on record. Now, that temperature would qualify as the ninth warmest year.

Did the AP forget how to do research?  The warmest years on record mostly occurred before Clinton became President — and before Clinton was born.  John at Power Line, suffering under the same weather conditions as me at the moment, noted this last night:

This displays a remarkable level of ignorance on the part of the Associated Press. Global temperature records are nowhere near accurate enough to rank years, over a period of centuries, with any confidence. For the recent past, though, we have the world’s best data set here in the U.S. And it’s true that at one time, it was widely believed that the 1990s were the warmest recent decade. But that was before it was discovered that NASA’s James Hansen, Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, had been fudging the data, either accidentally or on purpose. NASA was forced to correct its data, with the result that the ten warmest years on record here in the US are as follows: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939.

The AP apparently hasn’t gotten the word, perhaps because it is relying on the report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the IPCC report was a political document, not a scientific one, which deliberately ignored the most current research in the field.

They haven’t gotten the word?  More likely, they have ignored it in order to engage in global-warming hysteria.  Meanwhile, Hot Air readers in Minnesota should try to keep bundled up to avoid frostbite from all that global warming that just got delivered overnight.

I read it through and was considering a detailed response but I think this rebuttal sums it up better.  All I can say, is when your attempt to stimulate panic is so over the top and lacking in fact that even the people who support Global Warming are appalled, well then you have finally reached the pinnacle of journalistic malfeasance.

Even scientists who believe in global warming couldn’t quite believe their eyes.  They called the report by the Seth Borenstein a “polemic” and wondered when research stopped being a requirement for science reporters (via Q&O):

James O’Brien, an emeritus professor at Florida State University who studies climate variability and the oceans, said that global climate change is very important for the country and that Americans need to make sure they have the right answers for policy decisions. But he said he worries that scientists and policymakers are rushing to make changes based on bad science.

“Global climate change is occurring in many places in the world,” O’Brien said. “But everything that’s attributed to global warming, almost none of it is global warming.”

He took issue with the AP article’s assertion that melting Arctic ice will cause global sea levels to rise.

“When the Arctic Ocean ice melts, it never raises sea level because floating ice is floating ice, because it’s displacing water,” O’Brien said. “When the ice melts, sea level actually goes down.  I call it a fourth grade science experiment. Take a glass, put some ice in it. Put water in it. Mark level where water is. Let it [melt]. After the ice melts, the sea level didn’t go up in your glass of water. It’s called the Archimedes Principle.”

And that comes from Borenstein’s ally on global warming.  O’Brien calls hysteria on sea levels “major scare tactic,” the kind one would expect a science reporter to debunk rather than to perpetuate.  He wants public policy on climate change to be informed rather than hysterical.  The fact that water is less dense as a solid than as a liquid — which is why ice cubes float in your drink — never seems to occur to the AP’s “science” writer, who probably never heard of the Archimedes Principle before now.  The only way melting ice would raise sea levels would be if water was more dense as a solid than a liquid, which if true would mean ice would get submerged below water than float on top of it.

Who would have thought to actually apply scientific principles to a debate on science…

Other scientists blasted the entire basis of Borenstein’s reporting as well as his ignorance of research:

“If the issues weren’t so serious and the ramifications so profound, I would have to laugh at it,” said David Deming, a geology professor at the University of Oklahoma who has been critical of media reporting on the climate change issue. …

“The mean global temperature, at least as measured by satellite, is now the same as it was in the year 1980. In the last couple of years sea level has stopped rising. Hurricane and cyclone activity in the northern hemisphere is at a 24-year low and sea ice globally is also the same as it was in 1980.” …

Inconvenient Truths to people like Al Gore.

Michael R. Fox, a retired nuclear scientist and chemistry professor from the University of Idaho, is another academic who found serious flaws with the AP story’s approach to the issue.

“There’s very little that’s right about it,” Fox said. “And it’s really harmful to the United States because people like this Borenstein working for AP have an enormous impact on everyone, because AP sells their news service to a thousand news outlets.

Hot Air closes with this to say about the effect this journalistic crap:

Fox understands the problem, but undersells the scale.  When the AP produces propaganda rather than reporting, it gets distributed to thousands of publications around the world.    Unfortunately, the rebuttals don’t get that kind of distribution, and the lies and propaganda get accepted as truth.

Unfortunately, that’s been the history of the global-warming cult over the last decade.  They accept no challenges, demonize those who question their science, scoff at contradictory data (such as the fact that temperatures have stopped rising), and insist on politicizing their science rather than work from facts.  The AP has become the cult’s propaganda arm.

And not just the AP, though this piece has certainly made them the prom queens at the global warming dance.

And this is ever more critical as the democrats take over all three legs of the government, and we get to see what feel good eco nannyism they can come up with, while never bothering to let the scientists determine what the problem is, if anything.

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