The students know how quickly a news "package" can be made and put on the air. Real reporters at real TV stations do one every day. My students get a week to 8 days to create a finished story because of their limited access to equipment. CBS apparently needs almost 6 months to get a story done.

Why the deception?

Reach your own conclusions as to why there was such a delay. It would seem the text was not convincing enough without having to mislead the viewer.

'60 Minutes' Presents 'Waterworld': CBS Reporter Drowns Out Dissent on Climate Change

By: Ken Shepherd
Posted 02/20/06
03:59 PM

Who needs NBC’s coverage of Olympic ice dancing when CBS was thrilling viewers with visions of “Waterworld”? No, not the 1995 Kevin Costner clunker, but an apocalyptic “60 Minutes” report awash with flooded beaches and melted polar ice caps.

“The North Pole has been frozen for 100,000 years, but according to scientists, by the end of this century, that won't be true anymore. The top of the world is melting,” co-host Scott Pelley ominously opened his February 19 report, later suggesting the melting was irreversible. “There may be no stopping it. Arctic warming is accelerating. It's a chain reaction. As snow and ice melt, they reveal dark land and water that absorbs solar heat. That melts more snow and ice and round it goes.”

The “60 Minutes” co-anchor’s segment on global warming was spurred by a recent study in the journal Science that pegged faster-than-expected melting of glaciers in southern Greenland to global warming. But that view is not universally held in the scientific community, contrary to the impression Pelley gave viewers with his report, which featured only scientists who blamed climate change for faster glacial melting.

University of Virginia climatologist Pat Michaels attributes the speed-up in glacier melting to a climate cycle which usually runs over a period of 20-30 years. “Temperatures fluctuations around Greenland are part of a phenomenon – known as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) – that connects with temperature changes further south, in the hurricane formation regions of the tropical Atlantic,” wrote Michaels, a senior fellow for environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “The AMO goes through, as its name suggests, multi-decadal swings …When the AMO is in its positive (warm) phase, the Atlantic hurricane seasons become active with more and stronger storms; and, apparently, Greenland's glaciers flow faster and dump more ice into the ocean. When the AMO is in its negative (cool) phase, hurricane activity in the Atlantic is suppressed and Greenland's glaciers flow slowly.”

Correlating a change in the AMO 11 years ago with a change in glacier melting, Michaels concludes that there “is no need to invoke global warming for any of this.”

Pelley’s report came a few days after one-sided reporting on the same topic by ABC’s “World News Tonight” and The Washington Post. The Free Market Project has extensively tracked media bias on climate change, including a one-side documentary special on Fox News Channel in November 2005.

"There is virtually no disagreement in the scientific community any longer about global warming," he says. "The science that has been done in the last three to five years has been conclusive...There's just no longer any credible evidence that suggests that, a, the earth is not warming or, b, that greenhouse gasses [sic] are not the cause...

"It would be irresponsible of us to go find some scientist somewhere who is not thought of as being eminent in the field and put him on television with these other guys to cast doubt on what they're saying," he continues. "It would be difficult to find a scientist worth his salt in this subject who would suggest this wasn't happening. It would probably be someone whose grant has been funded by someone who finds reducing fossil fuel emissions detrimental to their own interests."

FOX Caves to the Global Warming Crowd
By Patrick J. Michaels
November 15, 2005

Forget “fair and balanced” on global warming. FOX News has caved to the global warming crowd, agreeing to air a “documentary” more one-sided than anything I’ve seen in the entire sad history of climate change journalism.

In fact, FOX management concedes that the program is biased. Clay Rawson, producer of the show “The Heat Is On,” recently admitted to Cybercast News Service, “Often on FOX News Channel, we present both sides, according to our ‘fair and balanced’ motto, but this is the global warming story”.

Much of the FOX documentary is filmed in Alaska, and there is considerable footage of retreating glaciers at Glacier Bay National Park in the southeastern part of the state. Glaciers there have been receding ever since John Muir first publicized them in the 19th century.

Thanks to the gold rush and the salmon fishing industry, the region offers some pretty good long-term temperature histories near Glacier Bay, from weather stations at Annette Island, Sitka, Juneau, and Yakutat. Averaging these stations from 1900 onward (and noting that the records have some gaps, and the Annette record only begins in 1940) reveals that there is no regional temperature trend—upward or downward—whatsoever when the entire 20th century is examined.

Study of average temperature across the entire huge state does find a significant jump in temperature in 1976. Climatologists have long debated the cause of that jump, which is known as the “Great Pacific Climate Shift,” and no computer model for human-induced global warming has ever simulated the event. However, since the jump, averaged Alaskan temperatures show no trend either upward or downward. That’s three decades, during the era in which there should have been the greatest changes because of carbon dioxide emissions.

That’s what makes the FOX telecast so frustrating—it presents a very simplistic conception of climate science. Consider the comments of FOX reporter Richard Folbaum on FOX’s Web site: “After months of research and interviews with experts, I’ve learned this simple fact: The earth is heating up. And it’s happening much faster than ever before. No one can argue with this.”

The first sentence is hardly news. Averaged across the globe, the planet has warmed about 0.8 degrees centigrade in the last 100 years. And humans have had something to do with the increase. But it’s difficult to square the data with global warming proponents’ claims that humanity has set in motion some sort of environmental Armageddon.

There are two periods of global warming in the last century, of roughly equal magnitude. The first one, which was especially strong in the artic, occurred from 1910 to 1940—too early to attribute to human causes. The second, beginning in the mid-1970s (note that it skipped Alaska), has a human component that is evident from the correspondence between global warming theory and the geographical distribution of temperature change.

But, with that said, Folbaum’s last two sentences are totally indefensible. Around the boundaries of the ice ages (which is where we still are), temperatures are known to go on some pretty wild excursions. In 2001, researcher Feng Hu wrote in the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that there were three periods in Alaska in the last 2,000 years that have been as warm as the current era. And just last year, researcher D. Kaufmann wrote in another respected journal, Quaternary Science Reviews, Alaska is roughly 2 °C cooler than during the period 9,000 to 11,500 years ago, when humans first settled there.

It wouldn’t just be “fair and balanced” for FOX to note those findings as part of its documentary; it would be the truth. Further, if FOX were really interested in the whole story, it would have noted that the reality of global warming tells us much about the future, and that the future is hardly dire.

We have spent billions of taxpayer dollars constructing various computer models of climate change. They predict different rates of warming, but they share a common behavior, which is that once human-induced warming is established, it takes place at a constant rate. So, all one has to do in order to estimate future warming is to know how fast it is warming now.

Indeed, since the human-attributed warming trend began some 30–35 years ago, the rate of global temperature rise has been remarkably constant. (A constant warming, by definition, cannot be “much faster than ever before”. The rate in the last ten years is the same as the previous ten years, etc, and also equals the rate observed in the early 20th century).

This constant rate projects the same amount of warming in the next 50 years that was experienced in the last 100, or in the range of 0.75 degrees centigrade. That’s hardly gloom and doom, because we lived well and prospered during the warming of the last 100 years. That prosperity will not be reversed by additional warming of the same order of magnitude.

None of those points will be made during the FOX telecast. Apparently, when it comes to global warming, “fair and balanced” does not apply.

Greenland and Antarctic Contributions to Sea Level Rise Reference
Zwally, H.J., Giovinetto, M.B., Li, J., Cornejo, H.G., Beckley, M.A., Brenner, A.C., Saba, J.L. and Yi, D. 2005. Mass changes of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and shelves and contributions to sea-level rise: 1992-2002. Journal of Glaciology 51: 509-527.

What was done
The authors determined changes in ice mass "from elevation changes derived from 10.5 years (Greenland) and 9 years (Antarctica) of satellite radar altimetry data from the European Remote-sensing Satellites ERS-1 and -2."

What was learned
Zwally et al. report that "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins (-42 ± 2 Gt a-1 below the equilibrium-line altitude (ELA)) and growing inland (+53 ± 2 Gt a-1 above the ELA) with a small overall mass gain (+11 ± 3 Gt a-1; -0.03 mm a-1 SLE (sea-level equivalent))." Likewise, they say that "the ice sheet in West Antarctica (WA) is losing mass (-47 ± 4 Gt a-1) and the ice sheet in East Antarctica (EA) shows a small mass gain (+16 ± 11 Gt a-1) for a combined net change of -31 ± 12 Gt a-1 (+0.08 mm a-1 SLE)." Hence, they report that "the contribution of the three ice sheets to sea level is +0.05 ± 0.03 mm a-1." Furthermore, although not impacting sea level, they note that "the Antarctic ice shelves show corresponding mass changes of -95 ± 11 GT a-1 in WA and +142 ± 10 Gt a-1 in EA."

What it means
We often hear horror stories about the potential for Greenland and Antarctica to add many meters to the level of the seas in response to global warming. However, Zwally et al. put things in proper perspective by noting that the real-world data they processed indicate that the ongoing contribution of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level "is small relative to the potential contribution from ice sheets." How small? At the current sea-level-equivalent ice-loss rate of 0.05 millimeters per year, it would take a full millennium to raise global sea level by just 5 cm, and it would take fully 20,000 years to raise it a single meter. In addition, Zwally et al. report that "the contribution of the ice sheets is also small compared to the most recent estimate of current sea-level rise of 2.8 ± 0.4 mm a-1 from satellite altimetry (Leuliette et al., 2004)," which in their words, "further confounds possible explanations of the causes of contemporary sea-level rise."

In conclusion, the real-world findings of Zwally et al. suggest that the climate-alarmist hype about global warming causing sea levels to rapidly rise to dangerous heights due to the mass wasting of earth's great ice sheets is simply false. This outrageous claim is nothing more than a scare tactic designed to persuade the public to accept the bitter pill they prescribe for the solving of a patently obvious non-problem.

Reference
Leuliette, E.W., Nerem, R.S. and Mitchum, G.T. 2004. Calibration of TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason altimeter data to construct a continuous record of mean sea level change. Marine Geodesy 27: 79-94
Reviewed 8 March 2006

Changes in ice mass are estimated from elevation changes derived from 10.5 years (Greenland) and 9 years (Antarctica) of satellite radar altimetry data from the European Remote-sensing Satellites ERS-1 and -2. For the first time, the dH/dt values are adjusted for changes in surface elevation resulting from temperature-driven variations in the rate of firn compaction. The Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins (−42 ± 2 Gt a−1 below the equilibrium-line altitude (ELA)) and growing inland (+53 ± 2 Gt a−1 above the ELA) with a small overall mass gain (+11 ± 3 Gt a−1; −0.03 mm a−1 SLE (sea-level equivalent)). The ice sheet in West Antarctica (WA) is losing mass (−47 ± 4 Gt a−1) and the ice sheet in East Antarctica (EA) shows a small mass gain (+16 ± 11 Gt a−1) for a combined net change of −31 ± 12 Gt a−1 (+0.08 mm a−1 SLE). The contribution of the three ice sheets to sea level is +0.05 ± 0.03 mm a−1. The Antarctic ice shelves show corresponding mass changes of −95 ± 11 Gt a−1 in WA and +142 ± 10 Gt a−1 in EA. Thinning at the margins of the Greenland ice sheet and growth at higher elevations is an expected response to increasing temperatures and precipitation in a warming climate. The marked thinnings in the Pine Island and Thwaites Glacier basins of WA and the Totten Glacier basin in EA are probably ice-dynamic responses to long-term climate change and perhaps past removal of their adjacent ice shelves. The ice growth in the southern Antarctic Peninsula and parts of EA may be due to increasing precipitation during the last century.