Comment: Telegraph story apologises for global warming stories

This article from the Sunday Telegraph (Sydney) deserved a comment. I commend the paper for giving readers a chance to comment on their stories - so many news sources (Author's) just sproat whatever comes from their tiny pee brains and leaves it at that. Noone can say boo to what they say. Fortunately though in this case, you can write a blog entry and link to the story - this gets back to the sources and allows readers the opportunity to see what you've said about the news item in question (for example, blogs can show 'back links' and similarly news sources can see who link to them. Google's Web Comments plugin shows what blogs link to a page they are looking at. So all is not lost. However it is good for news sites to let people comment directly in the news item itself.

I added my comment, which won't necessarily get published, so I'm doing the next best thing and writing a blog entry against it.

The comments were:

1. Atleast George Monbiot includes references to all material he's written. So many newspapers and other news sources brandish citations of what someone-or-rather has said or done but fail to specify a good source to verify this information.
   
   This article is largely harmless in its attempts to thwart the movement that is necessary to combat the evils of our modern western world. Though many, with uncited references aren't.
   

Now justification for my "taking the bait" -

2. George Monbiot and banning all sports - the reference is http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,1931004,00.html Please read it.
   
3. "Greenland's farmers, for example, are quite happy to be warmer, as the Wall Street Journal reported last July". As reported in a number of places (Here is a reference though not the one I was looking for), Global Warming will improve the climate and agricultural conditions of some places, BUT ONLY FOR A LITTLE WHILE. And even if it did stay good in some places, the conditions and results would be so much worse in so many others.
   
4. "The Earth is essentially defined by change - the concept of establishing permanent sea levels, static amounts of polar ice, and unvarying wildlife populations seems, well, unnatural, doesn't it?".
   
   Yes, change does occur including through evolution, however this has in the past, happened over thousands of years or more. We have changed the climate, the species distribution, and have caused an extreme number of species to become extinct, in a matter of 200 years. Gaia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_Movement) can not keep up.
   
5. "Gore's film (and related book) have generated who knows how much carbon outputs, from Al's international jet use".
   
   Yes, and you say 2 paragraphs above that "a wild-eyed army of warmanistas inspired by the film is holding town meetings across the US to further push Gore's message.". So through this, Gore no longer needs to travel to spread the message. Plus he made a film which is shipped around the world much more cheaply than himself.
   

If anything, I just needed to say those things. I don't doubt that news papers throw stories like that around just to get a reaction.