I'm not about to defend Fox News for their poor coverage of climate change or any other issue, but they are no worse than than the other networks. US media coverage of virtually any issue is, at best, worthless, and at worse downright mis-information.
With respect to this particular issue, I would point out that Judith Curry, cited by the article, is a climate change skeptic, and she didn't say the adjusted data was entirely accurate. She said the criticisms of it were overblown. As far as I can tell, most climate change skeptics within the climate science profession do not challenge the temperature data strongly despite some possible shortcomings, because we also have tropospheric temperature data taken from satellites and they are not subject to the kinds of adjustments that earth-based stations are.
Meanwhile, what was left out of this article and virtually all news reporting on the subject is rather the significant point that climate change is not the issue. Of course climate changes and the earth has been warming since the end of the Ice Age. The real controversy is over the cause of warming and climate change. Are these changes natural or man-made, and if man-made, what role does increased C02 play relative to other anthropogenic activities?
Can you name a single climate change skeptic within the climate science profession? I know there are reams of geologists, physicists, engineers and mathematicians who have come out as climate skeptics; but I am not aware of any climatologists - people who are currently both qualified in, and working in, the field of climatology - who have done so. I assume that there are a handful of such people, because there are bound to be nutters and contrarians in any large enough group; but I can't think of a single one in this case. Certainly they are a tiny minority in the field.
The cause of warming is completely uncontroversial; Carbon Dioxide prevents heat from being re-radiated from the Earth into space. The more of it there is, the greater the effect. That is simple physics, and is totally uncontroversial.
That CO
2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased since the industrial revolution is a simple matter of record.
That the source of this additional atmospheric CO
2 is the burning of coal, oil and gas is also uncontroversial - there was an equilibrium, we added a sizable input to that equilibrium, and if nothing further changes, the concentration will increase until a new equilibrium is reached.
So we have a clear mechanism (the greenhouse effect); An observed change in one of the inputs (the fact that lots of fuel has been and continues to be burned); an observed change in the resulting composition of the atmosphere (CO
2 levels are measurably greater now than they were in the past); and an observed change in global mean temperature (which conforms with the expectations raised by the other observations).
There is no controversy in any of this. The only area where any controversy still remains (amongst those who understand the simple facts of the issue) is whether the warming that is definitely occurring, and definitely caused by human activity, is going to lead to catastrophic changes in our environment, rather than merely tolerable changes; and if so, when this will happen and how bad will it be.
Given the relatively simple solutions that are available - such as replacing coal fired power plants with nuclear plants at the end of their working life - and given that a global catastrophe is something we should avoid if at all possible, the whole issue is a no-brainer; we should avoid finding out the hard way just how bad it can be, and should avoid adding more CO
2 than is absolutely necessary to the atmosphere until we are able to get a clear and definitive idea of what the effects of warming are likely to be.
Sadly, many of those in positions of influence appear to be well suited to the task of acting as though they have no brains.
