IPCC

A quick review of recent dispateches from the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, finds four items which unskeptically take claims of "global warming" at face value -- and that's just from Thursday and Friday.

Too bad for AP, and the public at large being brainwashed by the incessant repetition of what is proving to be patently false, that we're nearing the two-decade mark of flat worldwide temperatures, and that even reliably leftist outfits are starting to backtrack.

As is the case with so much that is being reported in other countries about how much of the rest of the world is walking itself back from the extreme statist agenda supposedly necessitated by "climate change," a presentation at the British House of Commons made by MIT Professor Richard Lindzen, whom James Delingpole at the UK Telegraph describes as "one of the world's greatest atmospheric physicists: perhaps the greatest," has gone virtually unreported in the U.S. establishment press.

There's a reason for this. As Delingpole notes ("Lindzen totally pwns the alarmists"): "... even if you'd come to the talk he gave in the House of Commons this week without prejudice or expectation, I can pretty much guarantee you would have been blown away by his elegant dismissal of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory." Here are excerpts from the PDF supporting Lindzen's appearance, followed by proof that the self-described outlets of record in the America have ignored it (bolds are mine):

On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency's Inspector General issued a report on the agency's "compliance with established policy and procedures" in connection with its "Greenhouse Gases Endangerment Finding." This was the finding that "greenhouse gas," or "GHG" emissions, including carbon dioxide, are in essence forms of air pollution, endanger public health, and must therefore be regulated.

As would sadly be expected, what the IG actually found and what the Associated Press's Dina Cappiello reported about the IG's findings sharply differ. Here's what IG Arthur A. Elkins, Jr. wrote in his press statement:

As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, the United Nations in 2005 wrongly predicted there would be 50 million environmental refugees by the end of the previous decade as a result of global warming.

Aaron Worthing noticed Friday that the 'handy map" the U.N. had created to identify places most at risk for such population migrations has been removed:

This would be really funny if it weren't for the fact that so many supposedly informed people, including our president and those who surround him, may actually buy into ideas being proposed at the United Nations-sponsored Cancun climate conference, and will relish the means by which they could be put into place.

At the UK Telegraph today, environment correspondent Louise Gray feeds us the following headline and sub-headline:

Cancun climate change summit: scientists call for rationing in developed world

Global warming is now such a serious threat to mankind that climate change experts are calling for Second World War-style rationing in rich countries to bring down carbon emissions.

From all appearances, such rationing would last at least two decades, during which there would be, by design, no economic growth. Zero, zip, nada.

Here are selected paragraphs from Gray's grouse (bolds and number tags are mine):

I owe Ottmar Edenhofer thanks for two things.

First, I am grateful that Edenhofer, a German economist who is "co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change," has a last name on which searching is easy. I quickly determined that his name last name doesn't currently come up in searches at the Associated Press's main web site, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times.

That's because he hasn't said or done anything newsworthy, right? Wrong. What's newsworthy is my second reason for thanking him. First covered at NewsBusters yesterday by Noel Sheppard, and described this evening in an Investors Business Daily editorial, Mr. Edenhofer has proffered the principal motivation behind the "climate change movement" -- redistribution of wealth (bolds are mine):

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change has instructed all 831 researchers contributing to the organization's next round of assessments to "keep a distance from the media."

Such was disseminated in a July 5 letter from IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri which has already garnered some criticism from folks on both sides of the anthropogenic global warming debate.

Even the New York Times' Andrew Revkin expressed disgust with this revelation Saturday:

The Pentagon rescinded the invitation of evangelist Franklin Graham to speak at its May 6 National Day of Prayer event because of complaints about his previous comments about Islam.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation expressed its concern over Graham's involvement with the event in an April 19 letter sent to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. MRFF's complaint about Graham, the son of Rev. Billy Graham, focused on remarks he made after 9/11 in which he called Islam "wicked" and "evil" and his lack of apology for those words.

Col. Tom Collins, an Army spokesman, told ABC News on April 22, "This Army honors all faiths and tries to inculcate our soldiers and work force with an appreciation of all faiths and his past comments just were not appropriate for this venue."

Of all the claims made in the ongoing debates over environmental issues and global warming, the assertion that the public hasn't been told or told enough about climate change is laughable at best. But that's what Gregory Lamb wrote in The Christian Science Monitor March 15.

What had Lamb troubled was that the American public's concern for global warming is at its lowest level years. According to a new Rasmussen poll, just 28 percent of Americans think it's a serious problem. To Lamb and the scientists he interviewed, that means the message isn't getting through, and scientists must look to new means of publicizing their work.

"The importance of getting the word out has science organizations scrambling to explore news channels, from souped up websites to asking Hollywood for help," he wrote.

"One effort ... will recruit Hollywood to help scientists tell their stories. NAS (National Academy of Sciences) and the University of Southern California will team up to draw on USC's expertise in film, TV, websites, and video games. The partnership will be the first between a federal agency and a film school."

USA Today on Thursday devoted a front page story to defending one of the key scientists involved in November's ClimateGate scandal.

In a piece entitled "Questions about research slow climate change efforts," author Brian Winter -- oh the irony! -- omitted important information about Penn State University's controversial global warming alarmist Michael Mann while downplaying the seriousness of the e-mail messages at the heart of the matter.

The main article also dishonestly ignored how Mann is being investigated by his own university concerning his involvement in the scandal, and actually NEVER even mentioned the scientist's infamous "Hockey Stick" graph that has been widely discredited by climatologists and meteorologists around the world.

Instead of a fair and balanced treatment of Mann and issues related to his view of anthropogenic global warming, readers were unfortunately presented with a grossly one-sided and disingenuous report evident in the very first paragraphs:

Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) is calling for a criminal investigation into the actions of scientists associated with the growing scandal known as ClimateGate.

The ranking Republican on the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee also wants former Vice President Al Gore to be brought back to Capitol Hill to defend comments he's made in the past to Congress concerning the theory of manmade global warming.

Such was reported by Charlie Martin Tuesday morning:

Yvo de Boer resigned yesterday as Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Here are three key passages from the official announcement at the UN's web site:

The top United Nations climate change official said today that he has made the “difficult decision” to step down from his position, citing his desire to pursue new opportunities to advance progress on the issue in both the private sector and academia.

.... Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement that he was informed by Mr. de Boer of his decision two days ago and respected his decision, but “with regret.”

“Developing countries need to move as quickly as possible toward a future of low-emissions growth and prosperity,” he stressed, noting that millions of people in Africa and around the world are suffering from climate change’s effects.

These people are still living in the fantasy world they have constructed over the past two decades.

Sadly, so is the Associated Press.

CNN on Tuesday highlighted the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change use of a unsubstantiated claim about the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 to put pressure on politicians across the globe. Meteorologist Rob Marciano thought the “snafu” on the part of the IPCC was “inexcusable,” while anchor Rick Sanchez put the panel and its head on his “List You Don’t Want to Be On.”

Marciano brought up the week-old story during a segment 49 minutes into the 8 am Eastern hour. He played a sound bite from climatologist Jim White, who was attending the annual Steamboat Springs Weather Summit in Colorado (Marciano was on-location in Steamboat Springs). The CNN meteorologist voiced his agreement with White, who blasted the IPCC’s exaggeration:

A scientist responsible for a key 2007 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warning Himalayan glaciers would be completely melted by 2035 has admitted that the claim was made to put political pressure on world leaders.

Such was revealed by the British Daily Mail Sunday in an article destined to further reduce the credibility of the world's so-called leading authority on manmade global warming.

As NewsBusters reported Saturday, the IPCC acknowledged earlier this week that its claim concerning these glaciers was based on junk science.

According to the Mail, those involved were quite aware of the faulty nature of this assertion, and did so for reasons consistent with what skeptics have been saying for years is at the very heart of the global warming myth (h/t Marc Morano):

Just days after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted it used junk science to predict Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035, its claim that global warming is linked to increased natural disasters has also been found to be wrongly concluded.

The British Times Online reported moments ago:

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The article continued:

CNN’s Jack Cafferty highlighted the research of “some scientists [who] insist the earth is entering a cooling trend” in a commentary on CNN.com. Cafferty detailed the harsh winter weather in the northern hemisphere over the past weeks, and noted that the research “could undermine...what we’ve been told about the warming of the Earth being caused only by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.”

The editorial on CNN’s website would have been read by the commentator during his usual 6 pm Eastern hour “Cafferty File” segment on The Situation Room, but it was preempted by CNN’s wall-to-wall coverage of the earthquake in Haiti, specifically Wolf Blitzer’s interview of former President Bill Clinton on the disaster. After noting the unusually cold weather and describing its adverse effects internationally, Cafferty summarized the findings of the scientists, that “this winter is only the start of a worldwide trend toward cooler weather, which could last for 20 to 30 years.”

Anderson Cooper reused a segment from CNN’s 2007 special “Planet in Peril” on his program on Tuesday, where he traveled to Greenland with a climate scientist to visit a melting glacier. The same scientist, who believes in manmade global warming, also appeared live with Cooper, and dismissed the ClimateGate scandal. The CNN anchor did not have any skeptics of manmade climate change on his program.

Cooper preceded his replay of his glacier report (which came 19 minutes into the 10 pm Eastern hour) with news briefs about the latest developments on the climate change debate: “Late word tonight that Sarah Palin is now calling for President Obama to boycott the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen. In an op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post, Palin says the leaked e-mails from a leading climate research group call into question the proposals being pushed at the two-week conference. Meantime, a U.N. weather agency made news today at the meeting when it said the current decade will likely be the warmest on record, and 2009 will probably be the fifth hottest year.”

Though none of this who appeared during the two-year-old segment- Cooper, Jeff Corwin of the Animal Planet cable network, or the climate scientist, Dr. Conrad Steffen of the University of Colorado- explicitly mentioned the manmade component of the ice melting, Dr. Steffen played up the most dire predictions of sea level rise:

CNN made a real, day-long effort on Monday to address the climate-change debate as a debate, giving skeptics of manmade climate change a series of chances to match the leftist view, especially during its evening programming. CNN is also the only U.S. TV news outlet so far to send an anchor to the Climate Research Unit at the center of the ClimateGate controversy.

International correspondent Phil Black’s interview of Lord Christopher Monckton, a prominent skeptic of the theory of manmade global warming, ran four minutes into the 6 pm Eastern hour. The “passionate skeptic on climate change,” as Black referred to him, traveled to Copenhagen for the UN’s climate change summit, and is one of the few skeptics of the theory of manmade climate change in attendance. The CNN correspondent actually compared belief in the theory to a religion at the beginning of his report: “Copenhagen’s Bella Conference Center has become an international temple for thousands of true believers, people who have no doubt the planet is warming and humankind is to blame. But there are a few people here who do not believe.”

Some climate alarmists are so invested in their beliefs and corresponding policy preferences that even a joke at their expense is grounds for disownment. New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin saw this trend first-hand when he cracked a joke about Copenhagen prostitutes, and was threatened with a "cutoff" by one of the world's leading alarmists.

"My lord. Copenhagen prostitutes push back on warnings about their services & offer free sex for cop15?  http://j.mp/cop15sex". So read a tweet from Revkin, which he published on the Times's Dot Earth blog. The University of Illinois's Michael Schlesinger sent a furious email to Revkin, calling his "unbelievable and unacceptable" joke "gutter reportage."

But an even more serious crime on Revkin's part was his audacity in relaying the words of others that criticize the close relationships between climate scientists and liberal advocacy groups:

Monday’s American Morning on CNN covered the ClimateGate scandal extensively, but slanted towards those who deny that the exposed e-mails amount to much. Anchor John Roberts let the interim director of the Climate Research Unit at the center of the controversy give his talking points without question. Out of the four segments on the scandal, two featured skeptics of the theory of manmade climate change.

Roberts, reporting live from the University of East Anglia, home to the CRU, led the 6 am Eastern hour with a preview of the program’s ClimateGate coverage: “I am in Norwich, England at the University of East Anglia and behind me here, this cylindrical building, is the Climatic Research Unit which finds itself at the epicenter of what’s being called ‘ClimateGate.’ Four thousand e-mails and documents were hacked out of the Climatic Research Unit’s server system...Some of those e-mails were looked at by skeptics, and are now being used to cast doubt on all of the science surrounding global warming. Skeptics claiming that some scientists were manipulating data to further their cause.”

On Friday’s Situation Room, CNN correspondent Mary Snow highlighted the latest developments on ClimateGate, but only played one sound bite from a skeptic of manmade climate change, as opposed to the four clips from proponents of the theory. Snow also omitted the left-wing affiliation of RealClimate.org, a website she mentioned during her report.

The correspondent led her report with a clip from Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who called for an investigation into the leaked e-mails at the center of the ClimateGate scandal. After noting some of the other fallout from the controversy over the past 2 weeks, Snow continued that “[t]hose who question the effects of human activity on climate change have seized on the e-mails, accusing scientists of conspiring to hide evidence and trying to destroy data. Among them, Republican Senator James Inhofe, who has called global warming a hoax. This week, he called for hearings...and the e-mails were raised at a House hearing this week.”

The CNN correspondent played two clips from that hearing. The first came from Republican John Shadegg of Arizona, who played up the leaked e-mails: “Anyone who thinks that those e-mails are insignificant, that they don’t damage the credibility of the entire movement, is naive.” She followed this with a sound bite from Jane Lubchenco of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who defended the apparent scientific soundness of the theory of manmade climate change: “E-mails really do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus and the independent scientific analyses of thousands of scientists around the world that tell us that the Earth is warming, and that the warming is largely a result of human activity.”

An earlier version of this blog post incorrectly stated that John Harris and Mike Allen of Politico declined to ask former vice president Al Gore about controversial emails from climate scientists who support the idea of anthropogenic global warming after knowledge of those emails was publicly disclosed.

In fact, the interview with Gore occurred before the emails were public knowledge, therefore Messrs. Harris and Allen could not have asked Gore about them. NewsBusters regrets the error.

Ben Stein made an indirect reference to the ClimateGate e-mail scandal during a face-off with Democratic strategist James Carville on Wednesday’s Situation Room: “The truth is, we’ve now got a lot of data coming out that the scientific community who are on the side of anthropogenic global warming were cooking the data and were suppressing data to those requesting their data.”

Stein and Carville appeared on the program’s regular “Strategy Session” segment 46 minutes into the 4 pm Eastern hour, less than an hour before CNN aired a slanted report on the e-mail scandal. Substitute anchor Suzanne Malveaux first raised President Obama’s upcoming trip to Copenhagen for the UN Climate Change Conference with the Democrat: “Obviously, this is a political issue. This is up to Congress. What can the President do on this issue?”

Carville went on the offensive out of the gate: “Well, unfortunately, I hope I’m wrong, but not very much, and I hope that talk radio and the pollution lobby are right that global warming is not a problem and 940 peer-reviewed scientific articles are wrong. That’s about all we can hope for because, right now, I have to tell you, that the pollution lobby and talk radio is winning this battle, and the will in the United States to do something about this is not what where I think it should be. But that’s the reality of the political situation as I see it right now.”

Stein rebuked his opponent for his labeling, and made his first reference to ClimateGate:

Has the emerging international ClimateGate scandal changed President Obama's global warming strategy?

After winning the Nobel Peace Prize last month, expectations were that Obama would not attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen due to it conflicting with the Nobel awards ceremony in Oslo.

This speculation was supported in the past couple of weeks when world leaders meeting in Singapore punted on reaching any firm agreements at the upcoming Copenhagen meeting, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-Nev.) delayed action on cap-and-trade legislation until next spring.

Yet, within days of the ClimateGate scandal breaking, Obama surprisingly announced that he's going to Copenhagen with a pledge for serious carbon dioxide emissions cuts.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Chris Horner told FBN's Charles Payne Wednesday that this is by no means a coincidence (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

As NewsBusters has been reporting since the ClimateGate scandal first broke last Friday, America's media have either been shamefully ignoring the sensitive information hacked from a British university's computer system or dishonestly telling the public there's nothing to it.

If these revelations furthered the global warming myth by implicating skeptical scientists in a conspiracy to adjust temperature data while shutting out opinions contrary to their own, press outlets would likely have their science divisions poring over every e-mail and document available to find the proverbial smoking gun.

Because in this instance any such research could uncover information contrary to the agenda of most news outlets, scientific editors and reporters have abdicated their investigative responsibilities in an obvious attempt to protect policies they support and advocate.

With that in mind, the American Thinker's Marc Sheppard, clearly doing the media's job, examined the computer program source code available in what was hacked from this British Climate Research Unit (CRU), and discovered that this scandal is everything the global warming-obsessed media fear:

FNC host Glenn Beck on Tuesday cited a NewsBusters article in his attack on all the television news outlets that have boycotted the growing ClimateGate scandal.

As NewsBusters reported earlier in the day, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC have completely ignored last week's bombshell story about controversial e-mail messages between some of the world's leading global warming alarmists.

By contrast, Fox has been all over this issue.

With this in mind, Beck used the NewsBusters piece to demonstrate that much as in their boycott of the ACORN scandal and green jobs czar Van Jones's peculiar associations, the television press are once again hiding important information from the public hoping it will all just go away (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

Our buddies at Minnesotans For Global Warming have done it again, this time addressing the growing scandal ClimateGate.

Using the old Tommy James and the Shondells classic "Draggin' the Line," our friend Elmer Beauregard has marvelously set this disgraceful episode to song.

Stow all fluids far from your computer, for the following is guaranteed to induce uncontrollable fits of laughter (video embedded below the fold with transcribed lyrics):

The release of internal emails from Britain's University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit shows scientists plotting to ostracize and marginalize other researchers who question their assumptions on anthropogenic global warming. Yet the Washington Post finds that such a strategy is but a natural reaction to attacks on these scientists by climate skeptics.

The Post characterizes the CRU, and the larger circle of scientists pushing the global warming theory, as "an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack." Readers must be forgiven for their confusion about who exactly is being attacked, as the Post goes on to detail CRU communications calling for a boycott of academic journals that publish articles critical of the supposed "consensus" on global warming. (Noel Sheppard reported on these and other incendiary statements in a Friday post.)

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," CRU director Phil Jones wrote of two skeptical academic works. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow--even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"