As Colorado Media Matters noted, Newsradio 850 KOA host Mike Rosen repeated misinformation about global warming in his October 19 Rocky Mountain News column. In doing so, he continued the trend of Colorado media figures attacking former Vice President Al Gore over his being awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize while ignoring the fact that Colorado-based researchers were co-recipients of the award for their contributions to the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) upon which much of Gore's global warming advocacy is based. One of the Colorado-based Nobel recipients, Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder (NCAR), responded to Rosen's column in a News “Speakout” op-ed piece published October 24 under the headline “Mostly wrong on warming.” In the guest editorial, Trenberth chastised Rosen for “fail[ing] to recognize that the Nobel Peace Prize was given to the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change and Al Gore (in that order)” and called comments Rosen made in his column -- “Al Gore's ignoble Nobel” -- “offensive” and “wrong.”
As of his October 24 KOA broadcast, Rosen had not responded to Trenberth's statements or acknowledged the role numerous Colorado scientists played in their capacity as contributing members of the IPCC, which shared the Nobel prize. The IPCC recently concluded in its 2007 report that the Earth's climate is warming and that most of the observed warming is “very likely” due to human influences.
Trenberth wrote in his op-ed piece, “As a scientist who has played a major role in IPCC for 20 years, Mike Rosen's comments are not only offensive, they are mostly wrong,” before refuting Rosen's global warming distortions point by point. Trenberth later stated that "[t]he shallow analysis by Rosen does him no credit," adding:
In contrast to his prediction that when future generations look back and regard Al Gore's 2007 Nobel Peace Prize as “even more preposterous than Yasser Arafat's Nobel for bringing peace to the Middle East,” I predict they will lament the wasted time in not getting our use of nonrenewable resources under control, and especially despise ignorant commentators who encouraged others not to take action.
As Colorado Media Matters noted, in his October 19 column, Rosen asserted that Gore “fann[ed] global warming hysteria with selective propaganda and gross exaggerations” and called his being awarded the Nobel “preposterous.” He also repeated a comment he made on his October 18 show, using a Nazi allusion to describe how some of those who believe in human-induced climate change characterize those who do not, saying of the latter, “they've been branded by global-warming brownshirts attempting to equate them with Holocaust 'deniers.' ”