Global Warming

"You Can With Beakman & Jax," a science comic for children that appears in 300 newspapers across the country, once again propagandized to young readers on Sunday. The May 2 edition featured a question from an E-mailer on who "writes myths." Artist Jox Church editorialized, "There are modern myths, too. Lots have to do with politics, like the kooky myth that global warming isn't real."

Church, who also created the TV show Beakman's World, has repeatedly used his comic to lecture children about climate change.

In an Otober 5, 2008 strip, he responded to a question about how erasers work. Church digressed, "Back in the 18th century, [Joseph] Priestley was a reverend searching for proof in the natural world as a way of proving his religion. That meant he already knew what he wanted to prove and gathered evidence to support that belief. This is also how some folks now fight against ideas such as global warming."

If you try to sweep your problems under the rug, they'll go away, right? Michael Mann, a Penn State professor and a central figure in the Climategate scandal and best known for his "hockey stick graph" hopes so.

On Fox News Channel's April 28 broadcast of "Your World with Neil Cavuto," Elmer Beauregard of Minnesotans for Global Warming appeared to explain the reasoning behind a video that drew the ire Mann. The video mocked the Penn State professor's alleged attempt to cover up data from tree rings that would indicate there was no global warming.

"Well, I don't know if you remember, but last fall, Obama was pushing the no cap-and-trade to go through the Senate because he wanted to have something to bring to Copenhagen," Beauregard said. "And just then Climategate broke and the mainstream press really wasn't covering it, so the coalition got together and we tried to think of a way to kind of bring this into the forefront of the American public. And I said I could make a funny YouTube video. And so, I did it to the tune of ‘Draggin' the Line' by Tommy James and The Shondells and put it up on YouTube and it went viral. And then Rush [Limbaugh] played it on his show and it went supernova."

Original "Hide the Decline" Video Below Fold

Young adults of a certain age will remember the 1992 environmental agitprop movie "FernGully," in which inhabitants of the last rainforest fight to save their environment. Well, bad ideas die hard. "Furry Vengeance," a new live-action children's movie starring Brendan Fraser and Brooke Shields, picks up where "FernGully" left off, thinly veiling its tree-hugging agenda with cheap laughs and cute, furry animals.

The story revolves around a real estate developer (Brendan Fraser) who is hired to slash down a forest in Oregon and convert it into a shopping mall (enter FernGully-like bulldozers). This, of course, upsets the local woodland critters, who, as the movie's Web site says, seek revenge by turning a "peaceful cul-de-sac under construction into a battefield of epic proportions." The movie's catch phrase reads, "He came. He saw. They conquered."

In case you missed it, expressing dissent about an issue that has become more and more politicized could warrant a lawsuit - even if it's just satire.

Michael Mann, a Penn State professor and a central figure in the Climategate scandal, but is best known for his "hockey stick graph" doesn't like being criticized. He has threatened to sue the creators of a video that has gone viral on YouTube mocking him. The creators of the video are a group called Minnesotans for Global Warming.

The possibility of a suit was the topic on Fox News April 27 "America Live," hosted by Megyn Kelly. Kelly asked ClimateDepot.com executive editor Marc Morano if Mann would be able to prove that this so-called YouTube spoof wasn't true and therefore win his lawsuit.

Chris Matthews spent an entire segment of Monday's Hardball sucking up to director James Cameron as the MSNBC host prodded the "Avatar" director to trash those in the "right wing media" who deny global warming, like Glenn Beck, as "very dangerous to this country." Cameron, who was on to plug the DVD version (coming soon to a landfill near you) of his pro-greenie fantasy flick, warned the Earth was being imperiled by not only the United States but also a rising middle class in places like India and China, and urged viewers to combat the "professional deniers" like Beck who are thwarting his fight against the "clear and present danger" of climate change. [audio available here]

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I'm worried about the media though. Because now we have a right wing media available. That if you feel like, if you're a business guy for example or a business woman and you want to have a good excuse, a good dodge not to do anything, well you listen to someone on the right like Beck who's willing to come in and say, "Oh you don't have to do anything. These guys are a bunch of tree huggers forget about it."

JAMES CAMERON: Right. Yeah.

MATTHEWS: What do you think of Beck's power in that direction, to give people a big excuse slip not to do anything?

On Saturday's Fox News Watch, while discussing media coverage of environmental issues on the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, host Jon Scott cited a special report from the Media Research Center's Business and Media Institute: "The Media Research Center posted a special report this week claiming networks generally hide the decline in credibility of claims of climate change."

Scott went on to add that: "48% of Americans, according to a March 2010 Gallup poll, think the threat of global warming is greatly exaggerated." Show panelist and Democratic strategist Kirsten Powers admitted: "It probably is exaggerated by some people....I know some very smart environmentalists who think that Al Gore has exaggerated it too much and has made it to a point where it's losing credibility." However, she quickly added: "it's still a very serious threat and so, just because it's exaggerated, doesn't mean it's not a serious threat."

Earlier in the discussion, Powers argued that environmentalists warning of global warming is similar to calls to stop using toxic lead paint: "people who believe in global warming, like myself, you know, are called 'doom and gloom people.' Well, guess what they used to be called when they were talking about lead paint and they were talking about the water being polluted, 'doom and gloom people.'"

America's media might hate the Tea Party movement, but Sting appears to love it.

"This is like a 'Green Tea Party' out there," Sting told CNN's Don Lemon Sunday about the Earth Day climate rally taking place in the nation's capital.

"People who care. People who care about clean water and fresh air for their children to breathe. Food that doesn't kill you. A better planet. A safer planet. And it is a tea party movement."

Of course, Lemon didn't ask Sting or his wife Trudie Styler if they believe folks that don't support this movement actually want dirty water, polluted air, and food that kills them, nor did he question the couple about their own astoundingly LARGE carbon footprint that makes them green hypocrites.

He also didn't point out the absurdity of referring to this rally as a "tea party movement" while in the same breath calling for "big government" to solve the world's problems (video follows with partial transcript and commentary, h/t Weasel Zippers): 

"Our intelligence analysts and our military folks tell us that environment factors, exactly -- environmental factors determine who we’re going to be fighting, where we’re going to fighting them, whether we’re going to be fighting them," said Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.).  "And so for me, for my colleagues, climate change is a national security issue."

Make sure you read the full CNS News story about Israel's comments.

ABC's Nightline on Thursday provided a welcome look at the significant number of meteorologists in America who are skeptical of man-made global warming. Instead of simply dismissing their views, reporter David Wright interviewed Accuweather's Joe Bastardi and allowed him to assert, "I think that the warming that we're having is cyclical in nature."

Such sentiments are not often seen on Nightline or other mainstream media programs. However, the program did put a more positive spin the agenda of climate scientists. Talking to Michael Mann, one of those involved in the ClimateGate scandal, Wright asserted, "Penn State's Michael Mann is one of the scientists who last year had his E-mails hacked and quoted worldwide by climate change skeptics as proof that scientists were cooking the books."

The journalist didn't explain what was in the hacked E-mails or even what the controversy was. (Mann and others discussed climate "tricks" and how to fudge and delete unfavorable data.) Instead, Wright sympathized, "You see this as a smear campaign?"

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."

In a sign of just how deep the MSM is in the global-warming tank, the White House Correspondents Association [WHCA] has announced that it is buying carbon credit offsets for travel connected with its big annual dinner [h/t Mike Allen's Politico Playbook].

WHCA president Ed Chen of Bloomberg announced the move, along with the dinner menu that included at least one "organic" item, then boasted [emphasis added]:

"The menu is consistent with our greening of the entire event -- a first in the 96-year history of WHCA. It includes WHCA buying carbon offsets for Leno's travels (air and ground) and POTUS motorcades to and from; ditto for WHCA board members and staff travel."

For more than two decades, the so-called mainstream media have preached the dangers of manmade global warming, insisting American businesses and consumers must make massive economic sacrifices to ward off a global climate catastrophe. Not even last November’s exposure of e-mails from leading scientists on the alarmist side of the debate — showing them conniving to fudge or suppress data, discredit critics and distort the peer review process — has caused journalists to finally take a skeptical approach to radical environmentalists’ doomsaying.

A new study from the MRC’s Business & Media Institute documents how ABC, CBS and NBC have been just as strident in their advocacy in the months following “ClimateGate” as they were in the 20 years that preceded the scandal. At the same time, a review of the Media Research Center’s archives going back to the late 1980s shows just how strongly reporters have pushed the liberal line on global warming. Here are just some of the many examples:

In advance of Earth Day, the Mini Page, a children's supplement that appears in 500 newspapers across the country, touted radical environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose baseless crusade against DDT caused the death of millions. (To read about her deadly legacy, go here.) 

Under the headline, "Happy Birthday, Earth Day," the April 18 edition provided no information on the negative impact of Carson's efforts. Instead, editor Betty Debnam enthused, "In 1962, a scientist, Rachel Carson, published a book called 'Silent Spring.' She caught everyone’s attention with her accounts of birds dying from pesticides. She warned that people were in danger too."

Debnam made no mention of the fact that Carson's "warning" was wrong. The National Academy of Sciences has called DDT the "greatest chemical ever discovered, a lifesaver of 500 million whose deaths were otherwise inevitable." Carson's claims that the pesticides could be linked to cancer have been thoroughly debunked. Yet, the Mini Page spun this activist as a hero to children across the country.

For years the global warming alarmists' mantra has been "the science is settled." But a recent series of shocking disclosures about climate science has shaken the credibility of that claim.

The first scandal - ClimateGate - came Nov. 20, 2009, after someone leaked thousands of e-mails from a major climate science group: University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The e-mails were full of startling admissions like this one: "We can't account for the lack of warming at the moment."

Since then there has been an avalanche of admissions and disclosures spreading online through Web sites and foreign newspapers. The cumulative effect has impacted the truthworthiness of the climate science movement. Yet the networks haven't even adjusted their news coverage of the global warming issue to reflect the discoveries.

Brent Bozell joined "Fox & Friends" on the 40th anniversary of Earth Day to discuss a new Business & Media Institute Special Report about the broadcast networks' distorted coverage of ClimateGate and other climate scandals.

Bozell highlighted the way the networks have barely reported ClimateGate and the other climate science scandals that have eroded the credibility of the global warming alarmism movement. Such stories were ignored because they didn't fit the "narrative" of the network news.

"What's been going on in the press; however, for a number of years is this systematic push to say that we can only have one point of view on this which is that it's settled science and it's over," Bozell told Fox News Channel.

In its puffy celebration of Earth Day on Thursday, The Washington Post found the green movement in "midlife crisis." Sadly, reported David Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin, the American people aren't grasping the immediacy of global warming, or seeing their exhalations as pollution:

The problems are more slippery: pollutants like greenhouse-gas emissions, which don't stink or sting the eyes. And current activists, by their own admission, rarely muster the kind of collar-grabbing immediacy that the first Earth Day gave to environmental causes.

"I don't think we've come up with a good way in the conservation movement of making it real for people," said Arturo Sandoval, who was 22 when he organized activities across the West on the first Earth Day.

A day after Minnesotans For Global Warming pulled their "Hide the Decline" video from YouTube at the request of ClimateGate scientist Michael Mann, all versions of this global warming satire were apparently removed from the powerful website.

As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, M4GW received a threat from Mann's representatives stating that if the video was not taken down, he would sue.

After M4GW complied with Mann's request, the No Cap and Trade Coalition posted a new version of "Hide the Decline" on YouTube.

Unfortunately on Wednesday, this new version AND all related videos were removed from YouTube supposedly due to a copyright claim by JibJab Media, Inc.

According to M4GW's Elmer Beauregard, this makes no sense ("Hide the Decline II" video embedded below the fold courtesy Breitbart TV):

In honor of Earth Day 2010, the Washington Post dedicated eight tree-killing pages to a special advertising supplement titled "Environmental Leadership." (Unavailable online).

Although it was woefully short on actual ads, the advertising supplement featured thirteen columns that sponsored, championed, and moralized the environmental catastrophe sure to result if Americans - and sometimes others - don't dramatically overhaul the economy and lifestyles. It predictably featured loud calls for more and more government while consciously downplaying the costs to the American economy.

Sources for the special "Environmental Leadership" supplement include:

• Sources for the special "Environmental Leadership" supplement include:
• New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg urging Congress to adopt the Green Taxis Act requiring all taxi owners to buy hybrids when retiring old vehicles.
• Greensburg, Kansas Mayor Bob Dixson recommending every city emulate Greensburg's environmental standards for buildings.
• Lisa P. Jackson, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency showing environmentalism and economic growth aren't mutually exclusive

Another country is looking into whether or not Al Gore's schlockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth" should carry a warning before it is shown in public schools.

In October 2007, a British judge ruled that there were so many material falsehood's in the film that they had to be disclosed to students before it was aired.

Now, a petition is being distributed in New Zealand for similar provisions to be implemented.

As New Zealand's National Business Review reported Wednesday:

ClimateGate scientist Michael Mann has threatened Minnesotans For Global Warming with legal action if their hit video "Hide the Decline" is not removed from YouTube.

As NewsBusters reported in November, M4GW, in response to highly incriminating e-mail messages hacked from the British Climatic Research Unit weeks earlier, created an absolutely delicious version of the Tommy James and the Shondells' classic "Draggin' the Line."

On Tuesday, M4GW informed their many fans that for financial reasons they have complied with Mann's request.

Fortunately, the No Cap and Trade Coalition has made a new version of "Hide the Decline," and they are hoping Mann tries to sue them claiming, "The legal discovery process would give us an opportunity to expose Dr. Mann's research - or lack thereof to public and legal scrutiny" (new video follows with excerpts of M4GW's announcement):

We have now reached the apex of "heads I win, tails you lose" global-warming alarmism. In his April 18 op-ed for the LA Times, author Eli Kintisch warned that "the world is running short on air pollution, and if we continue to cut back on smoke pouring forth from industrial smokestacks," global warming consequences could be "profound."

Having painted themselves into an environmental conundrum, Kintisch and climate scientists are left debating how they are going to proceed with sulfate aerosols - a natural and anthropogenic air pollutant believed to have cooling properties on the earth's atmosphere.

"Thanks to cooling by aerosols starting in the 1940s, however, the planet has only felt a portion of that greenhouse warming. In the 1980s, sulfate pollution dropped as Western nations enhanced pollution controls, and as a result, global warming accelerated," Kintisch wrote.

"There's hot debate over the size of what amounts to a cooling mask, but there's no question that it will diminish as industries continue to clean traditional pollutants from their smokestacks. Unlike CO2, which persists in the atmosphere for centuries, aerosols last for a week at most in the air. So cutting them would probably accelerate global warming rapidly."

Britain's left-of-center daily - "The Guardian" - has reported that former international environmental lawyer Polly Higgins has launched a new campaign urging the United Nations and the International Criminal Court to deem environmental damage on par with genocide and crimes against humanity in international courts.

"Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute ‘climate deniers' who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change," Juliette Jowit, "Guardian's" environmental editor wrote April 9.

"Higgins makes her case for ecocide to join that list with a simple equation: extraction leads to ecocide, which leads to resource depletion, and resource depletion leads to conflict. ‘The link is if you keep over-extracting from your capital asset we'll have very little left and we will go to war over our capital asset, the last of it,' adds Higgins, who has support in the UN and European commission, and among climate scientists, environmental lawyers and international campaign groups."

Among the "10 reasons why we need ecocide as the 5th international Crime Against Peace" on Higgins' "Thisisecocide" website, number five states "action can be taken against any individual. As an international crime against peace, no-one escapes liability" (emphasis theirs).

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert on Tuesday actually moderated a debate about global warming.

In fairness, it was less of a debate and more a vehicle for him to make fun of his guests Joe Bastardi of Accuweather and Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Regardless of the comedic intent on the part of the host, there were indeed some wonderful moments, in particular Bastardi pointing out that we're going to know in the next five to ten years whether there really is a connection between increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global temperatures (video follows with highlights and commentary):

One would think that in a story about how a four-year move-up of higher fleet gas mileage requirements being imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency would at least look at which manufacturers might be more or less affected by them based on what they currently sell, and how those sales are trending.

Well, most readers here don't think like writers at the Associated Press. Heck, in his report last Friday, the AP's Ken Thomas didn't even mention the fact that the EPA's regs represented a four-year move-up, and to a slightly higher standard -- apparently because doing so would have required him to mention the B-word (Bush) in connection with something seen as environmentally positive. Thomas also allowed "global warming" advocacy support to go unchallenged, as if the ClimateGate scandal that has wrecked the alarmists' entire case didn't exist.

Here are selected paragraphs from the AP report:

Once upon a time, liberals didn't much like Ronald Reagan - his policies, his ideology or even just because they thought he was a lousy executive and an "amiable dunce." 

"The Tower commission did not find Reagan a lousy orator; they found him a lousy president," Rep. Barney Frank said of Reagan to Time magazine in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra Affair in 1987.

And more recently, those on the left, and also some on the right, have declared the era of Reagan over for the Republican Party - a point more rational voices on the right aren't willing to concede.

So why are some supporters of liberal causes attempting to co-opt Reagan to promote their own ideals?

Asking "WWRD?" ("What would Reagan do?") is becoming a trend on myriad issues, including global warming alarmism, health care legislation, attacks on the Tea Party movement and, surprisingly, liberal pundits seeking to put the best face on President Barack Obama's leadership.

Videos Embedded Below Fold

YouTube is assisting Al "Eco-Prophet" Gore throw a Hail Mary pass to the growing segment of Americans who are "deniers" of the earth's "climate crisis."

This time, Gore and his organization, the Alliance for Climate Protection, has issued a call-to-arms for young hipsters to make a video about climate change for a YouTube Video Volunteer contest.

"[A]s we celebrate our 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, we need action on all fronts," Gore said on the weekend YouTube sermon. "We need to build on our individual and family commitments and use this historic moment facing our nation to make a difference in changing our laws and creating a better world for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren."

Gore's message was the same - humans cannot wait another minute preventing the doomsday catastrophe of global warming, and thus America's youth must demand a drastic and immediate overhaul of the entire U.S. economy. 

On the same day that Time magazine published a scare piece about the melting Arctic seas, a British paper reported recent findings that the amount of ice in northern waterways has dramatically increased to levels not seen in almost a decade.

"Reports about the melting ice caps are distressing" frantically began Time's "Putting a Price Tag on the Melting Ice Caps" Saturday.

Yet, moments earlier, Britain's Daily Mail reported:

New fuel standards make both the left and the media happy. It's easy to tell. There wasn't a single voice of opposition criticizing the latest act of Big Government on major prime-time news outlets ABC, CBS or NBC.

"Environmentalists are hailing the move as nothing short of historic," NBC's Lee Cowan said of the federal government's new fuel efficiency standards. The networks did much the same. Broad consensus from NBC's "Nightly News" and CBS's "Evening News" reflected praise for the Obama administration's latest regulatory efforts.

The federal government took a historic step April 1 to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. As part of a joint proposal by EPA and Transportation Department officials, the government implemented new fuel efficiency standards for all vehicles.

"This ends a debate that lasted nearly a decade," Cowan kicked-off the "Nightly News" segment. "But now that these so-called ‘clean-car standards' are going to be mandatory across the board, it makes it the first time ever that the federal government has limited greenhouse gas emissions."

"Nightly News" featured the opinions of three individuals who praised the new regulations. "This is sort of the first time that the United States government has stepped forward, to take the biggest single step forward to solving global warming," Bernadette Del Chiaro of Environment California said.

At Newsweek, the global warming crusade remains an important mission. The magazine's latest push came in an interview by CNN contributor Fareed Zakharia of Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Zakaria threw softballs to Chu throughout the article, as Newsweek showed it was simply a matter of when - not if - the administration should continue to pursue a drastic environmental agenda.

It was revealing which questions were - and were not - asked of the president's Energy Secretary. Zakaria made zero reference to  ClimateGate, the economic consequences of cap-and-trade and alternative energy, and no mention of the actual validity of climate change.

"Do you think that having a price on carbon is crucial?" Zakaria asked.

"I absolutely believe a price on carbon is essential - that will send a very important long-term signal," Chu said. "[But] if it's five years from now, I think it will be truly tragic, because other countries, notably China, are moving ahead so aggressively. They see this as their economic opportunity to lead in the next industrial revolution."

"A study released this year by researchers at Yale and George Mason found that 56 percent of Americans trusted weathercasters to tell them about global warming far more than they trusted other news media or public figures like former Vice President Al Gore."

So wrote the New York Times's Leslie Kaufman in a rather surprising piece published Tuesday.

Shhh. Wait. It got better -- A LOT better: