Washington, D.C.–(ENEWSPF)– During a July 1O’Reilly Factor discussion about whether “the liberal media” are helping President Obama “advance his energy agenda by spreading global warming propaganda,” guest host Juan Williams advanced falsehoods about global warming. Williams did not challenge Fox News contributor Bernie Goldberg when he falsely claimed that if journalists “did some real reporting, they would find out that in the past 10 years, the world temperatures haven’t gone up.” But climate scientists reject the idea that the fact that, in most data sets, annual global average temperatures have not surpassed their 1998 level is any indication that global warming is slowing or does not exist. Scientists have identified a long-term warming trend spanning several decades that is independent from the normal climate variability — which includes relatively short-term changes in climate due to events like El Niño and La Niña — to which they attribute the recent relatively cooler temperatures. Williams also did not challenge Goldberg’s assertion that “this is déjà vu all over again. This is the 1970s, when journalists warned us of another climate, you know, catastrophe that was coming. That time it was global cooling. And they warned us of the coming ice age. They were wrong about that.” But it is false to suggest, as Goldberg does, that in the 1970s there was a widespread scientific belief that the Earth was cooling that is tantamount to the current scientific consensus on global warming.
