Media Cool To Global Warming
By K. Daniel Glover | October 15, 2009
Can it be true? Are the liberal media actually awakening to the climate reality that manmade global warming is a hoax perpetrated by environmental fear-mongers?
Marc Morano of Climate Depot thinks so. He is convinced that 2009 will be remembered as the tipping point in the coverage of global warming, and he provides plenty of evidence to support that conclusion. Here are some of the bullet points, but be sure to click through to Climate Depot for the full list of footnoted proof of new skepticism in the mainstream press:
- "Appeals to authority about the alleged global warming "consensus" are now being met with a healthy dose of skepticism by increasing large portions of the mainstream media. Statements [saying the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control] "has spoken" no longer have the comforting effect on many key members of the journalistic flock."
- "A steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, a continued lack of global warming, real-world data and scientists continuing to dissent have finally moved major establishment media outlets to report that the debate not only is "not over" but that skeptics may have been correct all along."
- "In addition to the media, even climate and environmental activists are now questioning global warming."
- "The public has grown increasingly skeptical as the promoters of man-made climate fears have grown [direr]."
Some journalists -- a large contingent in the Society of Environmental Journalists, for starters -- likely are beyond hope. They will parrot the green view of the climate from here to doomsday eternity. Morano singled out ABC's Bill Blakemore and CBS' Scott Pelley, and possibly AP climate reporter Seth Borenstein.
But it's encouraging to see several signs of journalists acting like reporters rather than servants of the "settled science" crowd.
Of course, the end of one cycle of bad environmental reporting may just be the beginning of another. Morano also noted that the green crowd already has a new target -- plastics. The question is whether the liberal media once again will rush to follow the environmentalists' lead.
K. Daniel Glover is the online communications strategist for AIM for Accuracy In Media. He has worked as an editor, writer and new media specialist in the Washington area since 1991, spending most of that time at National Journal and Congressional Quarterly.
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In the town where I live in Nicaragua, dozens of shopkeepers and farmers have told me that it has grown much hotter over the past ten years. Are they part of the hoax too?
Carl,
I worked for the Meteorological Service of Canada for 31 years. I would be very interested in who these thousands of climatologists are that you claim supported the view that human activity and, especially, CO2, was driving climate change. There is a petition with more than 31,000 signatures of scientists that opposes this view but I have never seen evidence that large numbers of atmospheric scientists supported it. Most were guardedly skeptical.
So far as shopkeepers views on changing climate ~ no wonder you are clueless, friend. Have the shopkeepers and farmers kept a record of daily temperatures, max & min, recorded with calibrated instruments properly exposed? The national weather services have done so, and satellite data supports those networks and they all indicate cooling from 1945 to 1978, warming from 1979 to 1998 and cooling since then. But feel free to trust the hunches of your shopkeepers and urge the wasting of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on the basis of their assessment of the climate. Feel free to throw away the fruit of my labour on the basis of Nicaraguan shopkeepers’ views.
The idea that humans can stop the climate from changing (which it has always done and will always do) is intensely stupid.
Our wealth and intellectual energy would be much better spent on efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change rather than foolishly trying to stop it.
Furthermore, that wealth will be far more productive in accomplishing this goal if it is in the hands of millions of entrepreneurs. A small central planning group will never find the solutions that a vigorous and free market will rapidly develop.
We in Ohio had a relatively nice Spring and Summer. I personally don’t care what a bunch of Nicaraguan shopkeepers ‘feel’ about global warming. My garden did fine; it rained quite a bit this year.
And when it comes to CO2, breathe out, that is CO2. Look around you, every green thing out there is a user of CO2. That’s right. If we cut CO2, as advised by the global warming loonies, then the green things will begin to DIE. They too need a certain level of CO2. If they do not get it, ALL life on earth that is flesh and blood could suffer. If they green things do not get their CO2, then the flesh and blood things will not get the levels of O2 that they need.
CO2 is not a bad thing. Ever hear of a biosphere? A self-contained environment? A self-contained biosphere must contain plants and other green living ‘things’ because they produce the O2 that all flesh and blood things need to survive.
CO2 is not bad. Without it, WE die!
Carl,
There never where thousands of Climatologists. It was, from the beginning, and unsubstantiated claim. The mythical “consensus” was really a group of scientists, bureaucrats, and politicians (not necessarily in that order) that made up the Inter-GOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change. My intentional stress on the word Governmental ought to be your first clue. They then co-opted the primary media outlets to deploy political correctness to silence all debate. They had and continue to have a financial motivation for perpetrating their hoax on mankind. They want the citizens money under their control. Much of that money will be funneled to the scientific community after the politicians and bureaucrats take their cuts off the top.
In addition to new fees and taxes, they want more expensive everything so that you will have to use less and that will leave more for the elite that are running this gambit and pulling the political strings. Doubt it? Compare Al Gore’s use of energy to the average annual footprint and then investigate his net worth before and after his involvement in this hoax.
As for the farmers you are asking them the wrong question. Ask them if things don’t grow bigger and better in hot weather. The only thing growing at the North Pole is the polar bear population. Of course you wouldn’t know that if you relied entirely on the primary media outlets for you information.
Since no open debate was allowed on the subject of ‘man-made global warming’ in the MSM among climatologists since the 1990’s, and instead, the MSM covering this highly controversial topic as a done deal on Gore’s behalf, any fair-minded person must conclude that man-made global warming is a hoax. (Kind of reminds me of how passing NAFTA and the ‘need’ for last year’s bailouts were shoved down our throats in a similar matter).
Gore’s hypocrisy in the extravagant, energy-consuming lifestyle he leads, only serves as the ‘icing on the cake’ in regards to this charade.
OK, you win, global warming has apparently stopped. But that doesn´t mean it was a hoax from the very beginning, as some claim. The Larsen B ice shelf didn’t collapse by accident. As a matter of fact last year I read in the Scientific American an article by a big-shot glaciologist who wrote that the interface between the Antarctic ice cap and the bedrock has recently become lubricated with liquid water (as a result of global warming), which poses the danger of huge chunks of ice cap sliding into the Southern Ocean. You can’t pretend all this is just a fairy tale.
Even if the globe has ceased to warm, there are still good reasons for reducing CO2 emissions. Carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater forming carbonic acid. Consequently the oceans are constantly becoming more acidic. The rate of this acidification is too great for sea organisms to adapt to it by natural selection. Accordingly continued unrestricted CO2 emissions are condemning large chunks of the biosphere to extinction, regardless of temperature.
A propos Al Gore´s supposed huge carbon footprint: according to your resoning the only honest thing Gore could do would be to encourage everyone else to be as reckless a consumer as he (allegedly) is. Quite frankly I prefer him to keep mum about his wasteful lifestyle and go on preaching carbon frugality to the masses. The net effect on the environment would be favorable.
Dear Bill: Your stress on the “governmental” part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is cute, but misleading. Last time I checked the IPCC was exclusively composed of and run by scientists.
Of course, some of those scientists may be taking orders from their respective governments. This was the model imposed by the Bush II administration. At all international scientific conferences, US scientists were ordered to parrot the GOP party line, following the Soviet model. However, not many governments are that depraved.
Carl Stoll - re:#9
You may want to relegate yourself to the status of a ‘serf’ blindly following your elitist master’s hypocritical, self-serving whims, but most Americans have more self-respect than that. Perhaps you prefer the tyranny of a George III over a George Washington - that’s your privilege.
And Al Gore does fit the profile of a tyrant.
From the following article - Sept. ‘08
http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson227.html
[Speaking at the opening plenary session of the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York] - Gore said:
“If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”
Maybe “thug” is a more suitable term for this unbalanced individual?
This is the kind of emotionally-laden argument I try to avoid. You seem very worked up about something, but I can’t really tell what it is. I prefer relaxed discussions of substantive issues to name-calling. Why do you call Gore “unbalanced”? Was Mahatma Gandhi unbalanced? Please explain yourself. And that epithet “elitist” has long since ceased to have any discernible meaning.
If a former Republican VP called on anti-abortionists to commit “civil disobedience” to prevent abortion clinics from being built, wouldn’t you be outraged?...or, at least, get a little ‘emotional’ about such a declaration?
I thought we were supposed to be a nation of laws and not of mob-rule.
If you can’t discern a former Vice President’s call for ‘civil disobedience’, which is a strong implication of resorting to violence in order to implement a desired policy, as fitting the profile of an unbalanced personality, then there’s nothing I can further say that would change your mind.
I disagree with you when you equate civil disobedience with violence. Generally civil disobedience means non-violent, i.e. passive resistance. I don’t think of passive resistance as being the same as “mob rule”.
I think many laws are not a reflection of popular will, but rather the result of lobbying. It is an established fact that elected officials in the US try to please those who contribute to their campaigns, and not just those who elected them.
Consequently many laws are tainted by corruption, and a certain measure of civil disobedience is an effective countervailing force, because it demands re-examination and re-discussion of existing laws. This is especially true in the case of laws relating to energy and the environment that were enacted during the Bush II regime. They clearly respond to the interests of large corporations and disregard the public interest. I myself read the GOP law on preventing forest fires and was astonished at how blatantly the interests of logging companies were favored at the cost of the taxpayer.
Re: #14
I hope you’re correct, Carl, about your “passive resistance” reference in regards to Gore’s intentions, and I’m assuming you share my preference for changing debatable policies through a non-violent political process.
I also agree that too many of our laws are the result of lobbying, with some being outright unconstitutional.
I have talked this subject to death, including years here on AIM.
Gore seized a controversial subject and saw $$ signs in his eyes. For God’s sake, he uses more energy than eight households do, he drives a Cadillac Escalade that gets about 9 miles per gallon. That is just one of his automobiles, none of which are Hybrids, Electric, or even Bio-Diesel.
He owns a G-5 older Jet, that has the old style engines, possibly the most efficient jets made…Ahh, but he has “Carbon Credits” which he sells.
About the piece of ice the size of Rhode Island fell into the sea, was due to make room for a larger new ice forming. Infrared satellite shows a new underwater Ice Mountain on the eastern side of the polar Ice Cap. It is a Hoax, period…
Carl,
just as a point of clarification, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is a working group of some 3,000 delegates from 113 countries, this taken from thier own report. Many of those delegates are not Scientists, many of those scientists are not experts in the field of climatology. The internet provides many avenues for obtaining the names and positions of the working groups from the many IPCC Reports. You will find that any of these authors are not scientific Delegates. In point of fact, In January, 2005, Christopher Landsea withdrew from his participation in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Landsea claimed the IPCC had become politicized and the leadership ignored his concerns. Honest scientists will tell you the IPCC is more political than scientific. Roger A. Pielke, Jr. a professor of enviromental studies has been quoted as stating that “the human contribution” to climate change “is what is called a ‘hypothesis’ and not a ‘conclusion.” Political bodies, Carl, not scientific ones call for massive redistributions of income base upon hypothesis.
Carl Post #14:
“I disagree with you when you equate civil disobedience with violence. Generally civil disobedience means non-violent, i.e. passive resistance. I don’t think of passive resistance as being the same as “mob rule”.:
Reply-Not all the time, but generally most of the time, civil disobedience usually results in destruction of private properties, to the tune of 10’s of thousands, to hundreds of thousands in damage, which in most instances are not covered with the type of Insurance required by many of these companies. Most are never caught, putting the entire cost on the owners, and delaying manufacturing, workers going months without pay during the rebuilding…this includes fires set to destroy buildings. Those who are caught are instructed to pay damages, but never have the money to pay, They rarely if ever spend more that a week or two in jail..for ARSON, breaking into private property, and the mass destruction of property. Most are never even charge with B&E (Breaking and Entering). What would happen to those Owners if they did the same to those members and destroyed their homes…they would be spending quite awhile in jail.
If an Animal Right Activist throws a can of red pain on a woman wearing a Mink or expensive fur coat, which may cost $8,000.00 or more, is a CRIME not just civil disobedience.
If you protest without a permit, it is also against the law. I the many instances of people leaving Town Hall meetings are harassed or beaten, in the case of the SIEU Union members being sent out to “intimidate”, do not only arrest the perps, you should also file suit against the Unions for sending those members there in the first place. If you file criminal charges against the Unions themselves it is a fact that without supervision, physical harm is likely, they will pile up a Rap Sheet and lose credibility.
I August, 5 SIEU members surrounded a Black Republican, and almost beat him to death, should have been filed as a Hate Crime.
A few years ago, some animal rights activists staged an anti leather protest, where they sit naked in cages in the heart of NY’s News District (Rockefeller Center), Fox News went out to interview some of them, only to find out many of them were wearing leather sandals, it was hilarious when the news guy asked the about it…meanwhile on ABC and NBC, they showed the same people, but raised the cameras to conceal the sandals.
Two years ago here in Houston, there was a plan to build a very large Shopping Mall, environmentalists showed up from across the nation to have a sit-in to in the fields where clearing was due to start. Fox News sent their local News Team to talk to them.
Their goal was to stop the falling of three acres of trees. There was an aerial shot of hundreds (close to a thousand) of vehicles driven all the way from California to Washington State who had driven here (there was only one bus used), to join in the protest. While questioning the protesters, the reporter happened to ask several of them if their houses were made of wood, ashamedly most had to agree they were…total embarrassment on their part.
There were so many of them, HDP had to call in Metro buses to take them all to several Precincts to file Trespassing charges against them. Upon release they all found parking tickets on their cars for illegally parking on private property, many had blocked in neighborhoods driveways. Not only could they not leave their homes before tow trucks arrived, but that part of the residential area, autos had to be removed so school buses and Emergency Services could get through. The EMS people had to run several blocks to a man whose wife had called 911 to get an ambulance due to her husband having a heart attack, who could not be saved due to the time it took them to get there, and the Ambulance was needed to get him to the hospital in time. I think they should have all been charge as accessories to the death of that man.
Carl, if you are interested in the truth and not politically or economically motivated by the the need for AGW to be true, follow the link and read the article by Christopher Booker in the UK Telegraph.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6425269/The-real-climate-change-catastrophe.html#
Of particular note is the following excerpt:
The IPCC, through its series of weighty reports, was now to become the central player in the whole story. But rarely has the true nature of any international body been more widely misrepresented. It is commonly believed that the IPCC consists of “1,500 of the world’s top climate scientists”, charged with weighing all the scientific evidence for and against “human-induced climate change” in order to arrive at a “consensus”.
In fact, the IPCC was never intended to be anything of the kind. The vast majority of its contributors have never been climate scientists. Many are not scientists at all. And from the start, the purpose of the IPCC was not to test the theory, but to provide the most plausible case for promoting it. This was why the computer models it relied on as its chief source of evidence were all programmed to show that, as CO₂ levels continued to rise, so temperatures must inevitably follow.
Booker closes out the article with the follow real world danger warning:
“Thanks to misreading the significance of a brief period of rising temperatures at the end of the 20th century, the Western world (but not India or China) is now contemplating measures that add up to the most expensive economic suicide note ever written.
How long will it be before sanity and sound science break in on what begins to look like one of the most bizarre collective delusions ever to grip the human race?”
Is global warming caused by manufacturing area? I don’t think so. Now, if you want to hire freelancer to help you out, go to Freelancer.com and use this code BUILDIT4ME. You will have freelancer waiting for you to work for you
Dear Bill Powers: Thank you. I will certinly read it. CS
Carl, you are welcome. I ignored your passive back hand at Bush earlier. I am not a Bush apologist but you need to wake up to the truth. This cap and trade initiative led my the majority in Congress is the most totalitarian action ever proposed by a political body in the history of this country. You should be very afraid of the Democrats and the progressive movement. If you don’t take heed you will go to bed one night and wake up in 1984. Big Brother will be watching you.
Bill,
I have been saying the same thing in a few of my posts regarding Cap and Trade (The Climate Bill) which has the possibility of raising Utility Bills triple or more, some estimates put it an 80% overall increase.
Look guys, I want clean air to breath as much as anyone. However, studies have noted that putting Ethanol into vehicles is far worse than not. It is not only worse than leaded gasoline, but is also a Cancer causing agent, something that has been buried as much as possible. So much, that most of the reports have been scrubbed from the Internet. Almost all of my previous searches were bookmarked, whey I attempt to return there, the site(s) are no longer visible.
Mt. St. Helens, being a Moderate to Large volcanic eruption, scientists say more sulphur, carbons, and other dangerous pollutants equal all the man made carbons since the Iron Age, with several hundreds of years left were spewed into our atmosphere. But as most real scientists will tell you, the earth heals itself. AND that was only one eruption!
In the past 20 years, there has been NO change in the natural Ozone hole.
What concerns me more than C02, is the impending direct solar flares directly hitting the earth would be enough for us to no longer exist.
But I would much rather wait till that happens before we are forced to give up our liberties, free speech, and not having to etch out a living the Government has planned for us.
Somewhere, Orwell is in his grave laughing.
Wesley in Dallas, you are astute in your observation. The Progressive Movement is about one world governance. Here in America it necessitates the government takeover of the Free Market Economy. The four primary legs of the stool are the Financial, Manufacturing, Energy and Healthcare industries. To date the Government has taken a big bite out of the first two, and is planning to swallow whole the latter two.
Those elites (dare we call them wizards), at the tip of the “Progressive Spear”, have a vision of power and wealth for themselves which they in turn will apportion out to their family and friends. Of course since they will have all power theirs will be a glorious life with all their wants and needs fulfilled at the expense of the great unwashed masses. That is one powerful motivation. Anecdotally think of nationalized healthcare, a plan in which the elected leadership will not participate. It appears they will choose to keep their current healthcare coverage, a plan second to none in the world which includes a “first in line, for best care” provision for them over the rest of us at minimal cost.
The Progressive vision necessitates controlling the masses. In a democracy (aka our Representative Republic) the masses must be convinced to give over all their rights and liberties willingly. In order to coerce us, we the masses are subjected to drumbeats in the complicit media of “fear” and “guilt,” “doom” and “gloom.” Huh, sounds kind of like man made global warming to me. Do you think H1N1 fits the template? Think about it.
Here are some musings along those lines. Why is the media so outraged with the salaries of CEO’s and Presidents but never comments on the incomes of lawyers and law firms? Hey the ruinous owner of the Baltimore Orioles made billions in addition to his baseball team suing tobacco companies on behalf of state governments. Or how about this, why is the media so upset over energy and healthcare costs but oblivious to malpractice insurance rates and settlement awards? Better yet, where is the anger over tuition costs that have outpaced the growth of energy costs by 400% in the past 20 years. The starving professor is a near extinct species. They evolved into wine sipping liberal elites.
I fear it might be too late for us. Thanks to our Government, public education and their media cohorts, a majority no longer thinks of themselves as Americans but rather some evolved hyphenated mutation of the kind that once was proud and free. Now they are convinced that the world hates America for no articulated reason therefore we should hate ourselves too. Apparently these hyphenated-Americans have been duped into subjugating themselves for the promise of cradle to grave protection by the very people who not only hold them down but intend to hold all privilege and benefits back for themselves. By the time these dumbed down post 1990 public schools graduates figure it out, main stream America will look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Orwell’s vision will be something to strive for, a candly land by comparison.
If anyone doubts how this works the recent exposure of fraud and “dummied data” by those feeding the IPCC is being completely covered up by the alphabet news agencies. In scientific truth, the globe warms and cools primarily because of that big burning ball in the sky. The elites in the progressive movement want us to believe otherwise. The IPCC was commissioned to create a mythology. The story goes it is man’s fault and we must give over all money and control to the government so they can fix it. The very same government that has no track record of ever solving a problem will not only save our sorry soon to be starving selves but all those slippery cute penguins and fuzzy wuzzy polar bears. In return the planet will be pulled from the brink of extinction and the whole world will love us again. All we need do is to bow at the altar of the great and powerful OZ. How could we possible refuse to do that?
October 16 at 5:39 pm | #1 | Link
Perhaps the climate won’t warm after all. But to accuse thousands of climatologists of perpetrating a “hoax” is outrageous.