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Monday 30th October, 2006 (UPI)
The general manager of two TV stations in Maine has ordered his news department to stop covering global warming until Bar Harbor is underwater.
Michael Palmer told the joint news staff of WVII and WFVX in an e-mail that global warming stories are like 'the killer African bee scare' from the 1970s or, more recently, the Y2K scare when everyone's computer was going to self-destruct.
A copy of the e-mail was sent to The New York Times, which said Palmer did not respond to a request for comment. A former staff member told the newspaper Palmer's e-mail went out after the stations broadcast a report on Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth.
Palmer called the news report a commercial for Gore. He said the global warming issue had evolved from hard science into hard politics and this science is far from conclusive.
James Hansen, director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the newspaper the policy was irresponsible.
If you wait until Bar Harbor is underwater, it's too late, Hansen said. It won't be just Bar Harbor that is underwater, but many places around the globe including parts of Florida, Bangladesh and the Nile Delta.