Is the Media More Liberal Than the United Nations?

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The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is meeting this week in Valencia, Spain, to adopt and approve the contents of its Fourth Assessment Report first released in February.

If expectations for the proceedings pan out, it seems quite likely that media will change their view of this organization, and begin attacking it as too conservative. In fact, in anticipation of this gathering, Agence France-Presse has already done so (emphasis added throughout):

Some voices, including from within the IPCC itself, fear the panel's grand report will be badly out of date before it is even printed. Others quietly criticize the organization as being too conservative in its appreciation of the climate threat.

Though AFP didn't admit it, the fear is that the final version of AR4 isn't nearly as alarmist as recent press reports and claims by Hollywoodans like Nobel Laureate Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Laurie David, and Sheryl Crow:

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But some experts are worried, fearing that the IPCC's ponderous machinery, which gives birth to a new review only every five or six years, is falling dangerously behind with what's happening to Earth's climate systems.

The new report notably fails to take into account a batch of dramatic recent evidence, including the shrinkage of the Arctic ice cap, glacier loss in Greenland, a surge in levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and an apparent slowing of Earth's ability to absorb greenhouse gases, they say.

Of course, AFP chose not to inform readers of other issues that have surfaced since AR4 was first released including record levels of ice now present in Antarctica, and a huge mistake in how the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calculated temperatures this decade which radically altered America's warmest years in history rankings.

Recognizing some of the hypocrisies, environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg wrote an op-ed for the British Telegraph Sunday chronicling the disparities between what the IPCC has forecast, and the unscientific hysteria being disseminated by Gore and his sycophant devotees (emphasis added):

While Gore was creating alarm with his belief that a 20-foot-high wall of water would inundate low-lying cities, the IPCC showed us we should realistically prepare for a rise of one foot or so by the end of the century. Beyond the dramatic difference, it is also worth putting that one foot in perspective. Over the last 150 years, sea levels rose about one foot - yet, did we notice?

Most tellingly, while Gore was raising fears about the Gulf Stream halting and a new Ice Age starting, the scientists discounted the prospect entirely.

The Gulf Stream takes warm water from around Mexico and pushes it toward Europe. Around 8,000 years ago, a melting lake in the region of the present-day Canadian Great Lakes broke through and a massive torrent of cold, fresh water flooded into the North Atlantic, significantly slowing the Gulf Stream for around 400 years. Gore worries that Greenland's ice shelves could melt and do the same thing again.

Ice in Greenland is obviously melting. But over the next century, it'll spill 1,000 times less water into the ocean than occurred 8,000 years ago. It will have a negligible effect on the Gulf Stream.

In his movie An Inconvenient Truth, Gore claimed that scientists were discovering that the current is "surprisingly fragile". However, the IPCC scientists write in their 2007 report: "None of the current models simulates an abrupt reduction or shut-down" of the Gulf Stream.

As such, it's going to be very interesting to see how the IPCC meeting in Spain this week is covered. After all, the media have loved referencing the findings of this organization, although usually by cherry-picking sections of its reports that support the global warming myth whilst ignoring those that don't.

However, if the press are going to continue to fawn over Gore's much more alarmist version of the scam, how will press outlets report the goings on in Spain without threatening their precious canard concerning a supposed scientific consensus?

Of course, the reader should be aware that most scientists that don't buy into the charade are also antagonistic towards many of the declarations of the IPCC.

But, what has deliciously happened in the nine months that have followed the release of AR4 is that much of the climate alarmists - hysterically including the man that shared a Nobel Peace Price with said panel - have actually become even more cataclysmic in their assessments and predictions for the supposedly warming planet than this U.N body.

Imagine that: the media are now more liberal than the good folks at the United Nations.

—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters. Follow him at Facebook and Twitter.


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conservative

I know this is off subject a little but in reading how the term conservative is used in this article it seems obvious to me that Conservatives need to distance themselves from the liberal stereotyping of the term conservative. 

I believe one of the best things the Conservative movement could do for itself is to create an concise definition of 'Conservative' that can help remove the idea that conservatives believe in turning back the clock on society.  A definition that would allow people to see that Conservatives want to move the nation forward in all areas of society but to do so in a way that is beneficial to the whole society and not just to a select few that have a cause to rally around.

On a personal note, I had a history teacher in college that defined conservatives as religous fundamentalist that want to keep the nation as is or roll back the clock.  He threw in some asinine statements about trickle down economics but I'll spare you those comments. 

panic industry in a panic...?

This is really rich. The panic industry, lead by the MSM, is slowly losing ground to sanity and science. "Planet In Peril" should be nominated for best science fiction passing as news. If the MSM comes out and hammers the IPCC/UN, then I think they will have finally jumped the shark. I can only hope.

"Canadian" Great Lakes?

Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote the quoted op-ed debunking Al Gore's climate phobia, is a good expose', but I was shocked to read that Lomborg (a Dane) refers to the Great Lakes as "Canadian". Last I checked Canada only owned half each of Superior, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, and none of Lake Michigan. I think both Americans and Canadians would agree that the Great Lakes are more correctly termed "North American". I did check to see if Lomborg could be referring to some of Canada's other major lakes, but none of them drain into the North Atlantic so they could not be what he was referring to. Only the five Great Lakes all drain through the Saint Lawrence River into the North Atlantic.

I suspect that Lomborg's reference may be a related to some sort of residual Anglocentrism at the British Telegraph (where the op-ed appeared); Canada being a former dominion of the British Crown.

Media/UN: Liberal is too soft-core: socialist or communist

The usage of the word Conservatism has been distorted for decades – making it akin to fascism. The mass media, on the whole, being of a socialist dogma are beyond the outer-fringes of Liberalism. They are more akin to the likes of Pravda or the rags sold at checkout counters with fabricated news stories.

Truth is never part of the socialist agenda, they, as does the UN, prefer to fold, spin and manipulate news to meet a sinister strategy and, consequently, end. This is often touted by those wise to their unceasing fictitious spin, as the Big-Lie. One can hear or read it everyday during network or cable newscasts. They, the mass-media, has learned well from subsequent masters of the Big-Lie; the, now defunct, Soviet Union.

Our media and the UN are one of the same – socialists; liberal is much too soft-core to describe these deceivers of the people.  

The US is the final, the lone bastion of a true democracy on this earth. The socialists, er commies within our media, so-called academia and other institutions are hell-bent on its undermining. They cannot succeed by means of truth; only the Big-Lie.       

"I know this is off

"I know this is off subject a little but in reading how the term conservative is used in this article it seems obvious to me that Conservatives need to distance themselves from the liberal stereotyping of the term conservative." 

"I believe one of the best things the Conservative movement could do for itself is to create an concise definition of 'Conservative' that can help remove the idea that conservatives believe in turning back the clock on society."

 

Ironically, it`s the libs that want to turn back the clock on society. They want society to revert back to a 17th century, pre-industrial way of living.

How about "Conventionalist"

Or maybe even "Progressive Conventionalist" since I'm willing to move forward, but only when I feel the new path is in my best interest.

The lake referred to...

I live in New Jersey, and was recently surprised to learn that some time ago, most of the northern part of NJ and a great portion of southern New York state were submerged. The body of land that kept this water in place existed at what is now the Verazanno Narrows. The Hudson River used to flow westward through northern NJ, south toward Manville, then east to the coast.

When the land mass broke, the flood plain emptied. What we now see as the Hudson Valley with the present course of the Hudson River is a relatively recent development.

Give me a day and I'll pull up the citations. Or, I'd bet that a search on "geology" and "Verazanno" would quickly get you to the geological sites I was able to access.