How appropriate it was to open the Washington Post this Thanksgiving morning and find a letter-to-the-editor from Curtis Moore.
As many will recall, Moore sent me a vulgar e-mail last April threatening to sue me because I reprinted a report written by the Competitive Enterprise Institute referring to him as an "environmental activist."
In today's letter, Moore criticizes an earlier Washington Post letter-to-the-editor by John Carlisle of the National Center for Public Policy Research.
Moore criticized Carlisle's letter on four grounds: (1) No mention was made that Carlisle was affiliated with the National Center for Public Policy Research; (2) Carlisle was wrong about glacier melting and its relationship to global warming; (3) Carlisle's "obvious motives were to create confusion about global warming;" and (4) the original Joby Warrick-authored article that Carlisle had written about originally was 100 percent accurate.
Let's see how Moore's own letter stacks up against the facts.
First, Carlisle is with the National Center for Public Policy Research. Why mention of this was omitted from the Washington Post is anyone's guess. Perhaps it was omitted for the same reason -- i.e., an editorial decision by the Post -- that no mention was made of Curtis Moore's past affiliation with the American Lung Association. According to this April 1997 press release titled "Americans are dying needlessly from air pollution: Renewable energy can make a difference," Moore served as director of international programs for the American Lung Association. The American Lung Association is an advocacy group -- plain and simple -- for stringent environmental regulation, often based on junk science. Moore's criticism seems to be akin to the banana calling the school bus "yellow."
As far as glaciers melting, some are and some aren't -- just what one would expect in a world where climate varies. A 1989 paper by the World Glacier Monitoring Service published in Science, noted that between 1926 and 1960 more than 70 percent of 625 mountain glaciers in the U.S., Soviet Union, Iceland, Switzerland, Austria and Italy were retreating. After 1980, however, 55 percent of these same glaciers were advancing. [Source: Science and Environmental Policy Project.]
Moore's conclusion that Carlisle is trying to create confusion about global warming is not supported by any evidence whatsoever.
Finally, the claim that Joby Warrick's article is 100 percent accurate is laughable. Warrick wrote "While climate can shift abruptly without help from humans, most scientists believe people are contributing to warming the planet."
"Most scientists?" Neither Warrick nor Moore could demonstrate such a tally if their lives depended on it.
And now, it's time for some of the good kind of turkey.
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