As scientists and policy types figure out what changes will be necessary to cope with global warming, it's obvious that massive sea walls will be required to hold back rising oceans, that enormous new reservoirs will be needed to cope with the alternating droughts and deluges that many regions will suffer and that a crash program to develop heat- and drought-resistant crops would be a good idea if people are to keep eating....

With the swoop of her pen, or these days her keyboard, Begley is now convinced that man-made climate change is endangering birds of certain feathers. In one of her many non-referenced peril piece, she states rising "sea levels due to global warming isn't helping shorebirds." Funny how this apparently disastrous rise in sea level has gone unreported everywhere, except maybe in a certain PowerPoint presentation. Begley is asking Newsweek's readers to take her multi-tiered statements as a matter of faith (as fact would be pushing it). Read the entire piece, and try not to stumble over the hundred or so other reasons for why these birds may be in peril, but it just wouldn't make flashy headlines or reading. This must have been her Thanksgiving message to her loyal readers.

Suburbanites who put out black-oil sunflower seeds for their local songbirds are small compensation for the threat that suburbanization itself poses to several species. The red-cockaded woodpecker, for instance, has seen its home in the Southeast's long-leaf pine forests converted to suburbs and farms, isolating populations and slashing its numbers.

In discussing the practicality of Geo-Engineering as an emergency procedure to counter "dangerous global warming" and how "pitiful the world's efforts to control greenhouse gases are," Begley once again subjects the reader to facts that sound alarming, especially when they are taken out of context. Let's look at a few of her "Cassandra-ish" statements in her piece:

According to satellite measurements, sea levels rose 3.3 millimeters per year from 1993 to 2006; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had projected less than 2 millimeters.  

Let's take a snapshot of the last 100 years. Sea level change can be estimated from tide gauge data. These data reflect both water level changes and vertical land movement and the two have to be separated in order to estimate changes in sea level. Based on available analyses the rise over the last 100 years has been in the range 10-20 cm (or an average of 15).* That would be .15 cm per year or 1.5 mm per year. So Begley makes it sound like climate change projections are far too conservative.

Also, the IPCC projected loss of arctic sea ice at 2.5 percent per decade from 1953 to 2006. It's actually been 7.8 percent, or 30 years ahead of projections.

Slanting media coverage toward promoting the “fight global warming” cause wasn’t enough for Newsweek editor Sharon Begley. Now she has brazenly dismissed global warming skeptics as unreasonable lunatics.

Begley, a senior editor for the magazine, recently defended its August 13 issue that focused on the climate change “denial machine.” On the new The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media Web site, Begley compared global-warming skepticism to moon-landing denial.

When asked if journalists should be more interpretive or analytical in their climate change reporting Begley said, “It depends …When you cover the history of the space program, you don't quote the percentage of Americans who think the moon landings took place on a stage in Arizona.”

Now even the partisan-resistant public must acknowledge what conservatives have known for a long time: that Newsweek is driven by a leftist agenda, even if they won't acknowledge it themselves.

That can't be illustrated more clearly than by the magazine's cover story this week, titled "Global Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine." Science writer Sharon Begley writes proudly and passionately in what she obviously thinks is an eye-opening expose' about the conspiring entities who "deny the science of climate change." Her Woodward and Bernstein-like prose tracks money passages from big energy producers to intellectual skeptics, who exist to undermine what she says is the consensus view: that human-induced worldwide warming is a threat to the planet's existence. Begley bemoans the results of a new Newsweek poll that "finds the influence of the denial machine remains strong," with respondents split about human influence on the greenhouse effect. She blames the "well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks [disclosure: that's me!] and industry" for creating "a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.