Ray,
I am sorry, but with all the good will in the world, I fail to see how this disproofs the point that press coverage gives too much air time to sources not aligned with the dominant opinion that global warming is caused by man activity.
Bernard,
I've never got the impression in Australia that the press gives too much air time to the contrarians. In fact, my experience has been the opposite, which is why initially, about 15 years ago, I used to accept the claims that the current warming was unnatural and caused mainly by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, which could have serious consequences for the future.
However, that might have been because I tend to watch or listen to the more serious programs on Australian TV and radio, which included interviews of scientists such as James Lovelock and James Hansen, and documentaries by people like David Attenborough who seems very convinced that the Great Barrier Reef is under threat.
As a result of watching or listening to such interviews and documentaries, I became very interested in the general subject of climate change and ocean acidification,
from a scientific and historical perspective rather than just the perspective of the personal opinion of an individual scientist interviewed in the media.
As a consequence I began searching for published scientific papers on Google Scholar, relating to particular climate issues, and began participating in forum discussions where alternative interpretations of the data and evidence were discussed.
As a result of my own investigations and effort, I became aware of many of the "doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts" which were never mentioned in the Media in Australia when climate scientists were interviewed.
I became aware that the alarming claims of ocean acidification were actually represented by a small reduction in the average alkalinity of the ocean surfaces from a pH of 8.2 to 8.1 over a 150 year period. (A pH of 7 being neutral, and below 7 being acidic, a fact which I already knew because I've done some gardening.)
I became aware, from reading at least the abstracts of research papers, that the pH of the oceans varies considerably; far more than an average change of 0.1 pH. It changes according to the season of the year, the location of the ocean, and the depth of the ocean.
I became aware of the existence of warming and cooling periods in the past, such as the Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and that the current warm period is warm in relation to the Little Ice Age which ended about the time the industrial revolution took off.
I discovered that farmers have been injecting CO2 into their greenhouses for many decades because it significantly increases the crop growth.
I discovered that the constant claims in the media that extreme weather events such as cyclones, floods and droughts, will get worse as a result of CO2 emissions,
are not based upon sound evidence. The AR5 IPCC report, published in 2013, stated clearly that there was
'low confidence' (due to lack of evidence) that floods, droughts and hurricanes had been increasing in either severity or frequency since 1950, on a gloabal scale. However, they mentioned that there was 'high confidence' that megadroughts during the previous 500 years had been worse than any recent droughts in the 20th century.
The current IPCC report is still a work in progress, due out maybe in 2021, but there have been recent interim reports which confirm that there is still a lack of evidence to support a claim that floods, droughts and hurricanes have increased since 1950, globally.
I could go on and on but I'll leave it there for the time being. I'll finish with the advice, if you are genuinely interested in the issue of Anthropogenic Climate Change, and want to get to the truth, then you need to read both sides of the arguments and use your nous and rationality to determine what makes the most sense.
A relevant analogy, although limited as most analogies are, might be the choice of a new camera. Do you choose to buy a particular model of camera simply because an expert photographer recommends it, or do you dig into the details, consider alternative opinions, and look at scientific test results on sites such as DXOMARK?