Well, a news magazine is at least a factual document citing legitimate sources, while a novel is . . . fiction.
I don't know what you do for a living, but I'm a research scientist at LSU. And I'm not befuddled at all. My specialty is not climate, but I work in the Energy, Coast and Environment building with such specialists every day and I'm far from inexperienced in the subject. You are making a blind assumption.
Thanks for citing a source for your statement, I appreciate it. I must point out however that it has been criticised widely in the scientific community, most Harvard and MIT scientists included.
Link: Foes of global warming theory have energy ties
"WASHINGTON -- Non-profit organizations with ties to energy interests are promoting a controversial new study as proof that prevailing views of global warming are wrong.
The scientists who wrote the study contend that the global warming of recent decades is not without precedent during the past 1,000 years, as other scientists have claimed. In fact, they say the Earth was even warmer during what is known as the "medieval warm period" between A.D. 900 and 1300.
The paper has touched off a worldwide storm of e-mail among climate scientists, some of whom have proposed organizing a research boycott of two journals that published the study.
The links among authors of the new study, the non-profit groups and the energy interests illustrate a three-way intersection of money, science and policy. Energy interests underwrote the study and help finance the groups that are promoting it.
The study also illustrates a strategy adopted by some energy companies in the late 1980s to attack the credibility of climate science, said John Topping, president of the Climate Institute and a former Republican congressional staffer who founded the institute in 1986.
By relying on the news media's inclination to include both sides of a story, the industries were able to create the impression that scientists were deeply divided over climate change, Topping said. "It was all very shrewdly done," he said."
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AT A GLANCE
THE PREVAILING VIEW: Climate change threatens the global environment.
THE CONTROVERSY: Most climate scientists think the rise results from the atmospheric buildup of heat-trapping "greenhouse gases," especially carbon dioxide released by the combustion of fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum.
Industry-backed groups claim their study challenges the validity of this view by presenting evidence of global warming at a time when fossil fuels were not being burned in appreciable quantities.
THE JOURNALS REPORTING IT: British scientific journal, Energy and Environment; Discovery Channel Online
THE BACKERS:
The research was underwritten by the American Petroleum Institute, the trade association of the world's largest oil companies.
Two of the five authors are scientists who have been linked to the coal industry and have received support from the ExxonMobil Foundation.
Two others, who are affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also have the title of "senior scientists" with a Washington-based organization supported by conservative foundations and ExxonMobil Corp.
The organization, the George T. Marshall Institute, is headed by William O'Keefe, a former executive of the American Petroleum Institute.
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