11 May 2005

Global Warming and the perils of the Internet

I am getting old but I do worry about poor David Bellamy. His attitude to Global Warming seems a bit strange:

"555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980."

But the WGMS replied:

"I don't think the response would have been published in Nature, but it had the scientific virtue of clarity: "This is complete bullshit."

The article goes on to explain that:

"there you have it – a 16 year old article that was never written, fraudulently cited by a climate skeptic, re-printed in a publication owned by Lyndon Larouche which was cited by a former architect, and finally misrepresented by a credible scientist. One can only wonder what Bellamy was thinking."

Maybe there are is a lesson for the rest of us:

Don't believe something just because it is published on the Internet or agrees with your own inclinations. Verify the facts on an issue and do your own research before making up your mind.

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