O'Reilly fill-in Williams provides platform for global warming misinformation
Guest-hosting The O'Reilly Factor, Juan Williams did not challenge Bernie Goldberg's false claims about global warming.
During a July 1 O'Reilly Factor discussion about whether "the liberal media" are helping President Obama "advance his energy agenda by spreading global warming propaganda," guest host Juan Williams advanced falsehoods about global warming. Williams did not challenge Fox News contributor Bernie Goldberg when he falsely claimed that if journalists "did some real reporting, they would find out that in the past 10 years, the world temperatures haven't gone up." But climate scientists reject the idea that the fact that, in most datasets, annual global average temperatures have not surpassed their 1998 level is any indication that global warming is slowing or does not exist. Scientists have identified a long-term warming trend spanning several decades that is independent from the normal climate variability -- which includes relatively short-term changes in climate due to events like El Niño and La Niña -- to which they attribute the recent relatively cooler temperatures. Williams also did not challenge Goldberg's assertion that "this is déjà vu all over again. This is the 1970s, when journalists warned us of another climate, you know, catastrophe that was coming. That time it was global cooling. And they warned us of the coming ice age. They were wrong about that." But it is false to suggest, as Goldberg does, that in the 1970s there was a widespread scientific belief that the Earth was cooling that is tantamount to the current scientific consensus on global warming.
As Media Matters for America has noted, in a February 11 Guardian op-ed, Vicky Pope, the head of climate change advice at the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre, wrote that claims about the pace of global warming based only on developments in the past 10 years or in the 1990s are not valid, "since natural variations always occur on this timescale." She continued, "1998 was a record-breaking warm year as long-term man-made warming combined with a naturally occurring strong El Niño. In contrast, 2008 was slightly cooler than previous years partly because of a La Niña. Despite this, it was still the 10th warmest on record." According to the Met Office, "Over the last ten years, global temperatures have warmed more slowly than the long-term trend. But this does not mean that global warming has slowed down or even stopped. It is entirely consistent with our understanding of natural fluctuations of the climate within a trend of continued long-term warming." This long-term trend can be seen in this graph of annual global average temperatures from the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre
