Media Matters yesterday commented on how CNN allowed a climate skeptic to misreport the content of both An Inconvenient Truth and the IPCC Report:
CNN's Collins did not challenge CEI fellow's distortion of Gore's sea level claim
Here are some excerpts from the Media Matters Report:
"On the October 12 edition of CNN Newsroom, co-anchor Heidi Collins did not challenge the assertion by Marlo Lewis Jr., a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, that former Vice President Al Gore -- a 2007 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize -- in his film, An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount Classics, May 2006), claimed that, because of global warming, sea level would rise "20 feet ... in this century." Lewis added, "That is science fiction, but Gore presented it as fact. It's scaremongering." As Media Matters for America has repeatedly noted, Gore was specifically addressing what could happen if the West Antarctic ice shelf or the Greenland ice dome "broke up and slipped into the sea" at an indefinite point in the future, not "in this century."
As Media Matters also documented, in a February 2007 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that "[c]ontraction of the Greenland ice sheet is projected to continue to contribute to sea level rise after 2100," and that "[i]f a negative surface mass balance were sustained for millennia, that would lead to virtually complete elimination of the Greenland ice sheet and a resulting contribution to sea level rise of about 7 m," which is equivalent to approximately 23 feet.
During the CNN segment, Collins introduced Lewis only as "a critic of Gore's global warming claims," a "senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute," and the author of "A Skeptic's Guide to An Inconvenient Truth." She did not note that CEI has received funding from energy industry sources, including, as Media Matters has repeatedly noted, more than $2 million from the Exxon Mobil Corp. since 1998. According to the weblog Think Progress, Exxon Mobil no longer provides funding to CEI. On the August 15 edition of NBC's Nightly News, NBC News chief environmental affairs correspondent Anne Thompson noted that "[t]he Union of Concerned Scientists says Exxon Mobil gave almost $16 million over seven years to denier groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute." Thompson aired a clip of Lewis claiming, "We don't take that position because they invest. It's the other way around, and any environmental group that is honest and has any familiarity with us knows that to be the case." In addition, as Colorado Media Matters noted, CEI has received funding from right-wing financiers and organizations, such as Richard Mellon Scaife, the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation."
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