FOX News and other right-wing media outfits have been ecstatic the past couple of days over an article printed in the (U.K.) Daily Mail by David Rose, purporting to debunk global warming.
The Daily Mail article misleadingly cites the work of a top U.N. researcher, Professor Mojib Latif. Rose breathlessly reports that Professor Latif, "a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda," has discovered that the globe is not warming, but rather is actually entering what Rose catchily-brands as a "mini ice age."
Small problem: Prof. Latif says his research does not support Rose's characterizations whatsoever. Details after the jump...
Interviewed today in the Guardian (also U.K.), Prof. Latif firmly rejects Rose's misuse of his research:
A leading scientist has hit out at misleading newspaper reports that linked his research to claims that the current cold weather undermines the scientific case for manmade global warming.
Mojib Latif, a climate expert at the Leibniz Institute at Kiel University in Germany, said he "cannot understand" reports that used his research to question the scientific consensus on climate change. "It comes as a surprise to me that people would try to use my statements to try to dispute the nature of global warming. I believe in manmade global warming." [...]
He added: "There is no doubt within the scientific community that we are affecting the climate, that the climate is changing and responding to our emissions of greenhouse gases."
This is the second time in recent months that Rose has been called on the carpet by a prominent scientist for misrpresenting their work in order to "debunk" global warming. (Rose was evidently also duped by Bush/Blair claims about Iraq and WMD, according to the same site linked above.)
And yet Rose continues to write these articles, because they garner him vast attention from rightward-leaning media and industry-funded thinktanks around the world. For as Rolling Stone makes clear in its current cover story, being a global warming denier is more than a cottage industry, it's a booming business...
UPDTATE: There is a roundup of Rose's latest shenanigans at Climate Progress.
