Global Warming

Good Morning America's weatherman and resident environmental alarmist Sam Champion on Friday promoted Earth Hour 2010, a call for people to sit in the dark at 8:30pm local time on Saturday and reflect on global warming. Champion enthused, "So, tomorrow night at 8:30, you can turn your lights off and join people around the world as they say 'Hey, we simply care and that climate change is something we want to make a statement about.'"

To make the concept very clear, the weatherman (see file photo above) repeated, "That statement is simply that you care." Of course, Champion and GMA found no such time to report on the ClimateGate scandal. On December 09, 2009, when asked about this on Twitter, Champion Tweeted back: "i kno what u refer to! [sic] there is quite a controversy surrounding the veracity of that stolen info...not reportable as such."

On Friday, Champion trumpeted, "We want to tell you that something very special is happening tomorrow night at 8:30 local time around the world. Something that you can take part in by flipping a light switch. It's called Earth Hour." The weatherman didn't explain what specific good Earth Hour will accomplish, other than showing that "you care."

Reporting on the findings of a new study released last week, Than repeated the study authors' estimate of increase in violence as temperatures climb: "[I]f the average temperature in the U.S. increases by 8 degrees Fahrenheit, the country's murder and assault rate will jump by about a hundred thousand cases a year."

Than also used temperature projections from the UN's IPCC, which has recently been forced to admit "flaws" in its reports since the ClimateGate scandal broke in November 2009.

"A 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that global surface temperatures could rise by 2 to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit" by 2100, he wrote without mentioning any of the criticisms of the IPCC or their own admission of problematic data.

Blame it on ClimateGate. Ever since those controversial e-mails and documents exposed manipulated climate change numbers, liberals have been scrambling to regain their footing and their followers. The Economist's cover article of their March 18th edition, "Spin, Science and Climate Change," shows just how desperate their situation is.

The subhead of the article reads, "Action on climate is justified, not because the science is certain, but precisely because it is not." Forget what the numbers say - especially the ones that don't validate climate change - The Economist "sees no reason to alter its view" on the subject. The earth is a turning into a molten lava cake and nothing will convince these journalists otherwise. For a newspaper that claims it was founded on the principle that everything "put forward [in the paper] should be subjected to the test of facts," this article didn't even meet its own criteria.

The article blamed the lack of action against climate change on everything from the recession to the health care debate to the northern hemisphere's cold winter to the ClimateGate scandal. But the biggest problem, it said, lies in politicians who, heaven forbid, have actually looked at the scientific numbers and concluded that it cannot be arguably proven that climate change even exists or, if it does, that it's caused by man or in any way threatens our existence.

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."

A British agency has banned two government television ads for exaggerating the danger of global warming.

In what we would call public service announcements in the States, the Department of Energy and Climate Change actually used nursery rhymes to scare people into thinking England was in imminent peril as a result of Nobel Laureate Al Gore's favorite money-making theory.

As reported by BBC.com Wednesday:

In case you missed this one, former Vice President Al Gore is looking for anything - any weather event at all to correlate to so-called anthropogenic global warming.

During a conference call for activist hosted by his group Repower America on March 15, Gore attached blame to the recent windy and rainy weather in the Northeastern United States could be tied to global warming.

"Just look at what has been happening for the last three days," Gore said. "The so-called skeptics haven't noted it because it's not snow. But the downpours and heavy winds are consistent with what the scientists have long warned about."

This caught the attention of Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity. On his March 16 broadcast, Hannity pointed Gore's wisdom out for his viewers.

Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said Monday that Nobel Laureate Al Gore, "the world's first potential climate billionaire," is running for cover as a result of various scandals surrounding his favorite money-making theory known as manmade global warming.

"He is under siege these days," said Inhofe in a lengthy speech on the Senate floor. "The credibility of the IPCC is eroding, EPA's endangerment finding is collapsing, and belief that anthropogenic global warming is leading to catastrophe is evaporating."

"Gore seems to be drowning in a sea of his own global warming illusions," he continued. Nevertheless, he is desperately trying to keep global warming alarmism alive."

Unlike most on the Left and their media minions, Inhofe also spoke specifically about some of Gore's investments, and how the Nobel Laureate has positioned himself to amass huge profts from his climate alarmism (videos embedded below the fold with partial transcript and commentary):

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:

A report released Monday says that California's new global warming law will increase unemployment in the Golden State.

The announcement was in stark contrast to continual claims by the Left and their media minions that proposed cap and trade legislation at the federal level will result in an explosion in green jobs.

As reported by the Los Angeles Times Wednesday, the nation's most populated state, which is the first to impose laws concerning carbon dioxide emissions, might see a net reduction in employment as a result:

Moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty.   ---Derek Zoolander

I don't know which is funnier; a global warming themed fashion show or the fact that the Associated Press reports on it with a completely straight face. They assume the polar ice caps are melting so what to do? Waste carbon shipping giant icebergs from Sweden just to adorn a Paris fashion show runway. Jenny Barchfield delivers the report on "Chanel does climate change, with real icebergs" which sounds like a story pitch for a Zoolander sequel:

PARIS — Models in head-to-toe yeti suits picked their way around towering but quickly melting icebergs, sloshing through a deep puddle of Arctic melt in their shaggy fake fur.

Call it climate change chic, Chanel style.

Designer Karl Lagerfeld looked Tuesday to global warming, turning the melting of the polar ice caps into fodder for Chanel's fall-winter 2010-11 ready-to-wear look. Because, after all, what use is the threat of a catastrophe of global proportions if not to fuel fashion trends and inspire clever variations on Chanel's iconic styles?

Liberal weatherman Sam Champion appeared on Friday's Nightline to attack the idea that global warming could be dismissed because of the snowy winter suffered by much of the country. He complained, "There's really no way you can connect it to climate change or global warming. This is a seasonal pattern that we're in." [Audio available here.]

And yet, on the June 9, 2008 edition of Good Morning America, Champion reported on the late spring heat wave much America was enduring. He alerted, "Dr. Stephen Schneider of Stanford University believes climate change is also playing a role."

Schneider proclaimed, "While this heat wave, like all other heat waves, is made by Mother Nature, we've been fooling around by turning the knob and making it a little bit hotter."

A new study predicts that global warming, contrary to claims made by Nobel Laureate Al Gore and the his fellow climate alarmists, will actually reduce the number of hurricanes by as much as 34 percent by the year 2100.

The report just published in the journal Nature Geoscience also found that the increase in tropical storm activity the planet has seen since 1995 is part of a natural cycle completely unrelated to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

These revelations represent another serious crack in the claims made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and therefore seem quite unlikely to be reported by American media that have been largely ignoring all the errors that have been found recently in key IPCC documents.

As is typical, this bombshell was uncovered by a British publication, the Sunday Times (h/t Ed Morrissey):

Demonstrating how Hollywood writers aren't reticent about inserting gratuitous political points into prime time dramas, on last Sunday night's (February 21) episode of ABC's Brothers and Sisters, “Nora Walker,” played by liberal actress Sally Field, walked into her kitchen during a kick-off party for her daughter's Republican senatorial campaign, and complained to another daughter, a son and his husband:

I can't believe the three of you are in here drinking while the GOP is out there denying global warming.

The far-fetched current storyline has “Kitty Walker,” played by Calista Flockhart, weeks after a battle with cancer and adopting a baby, running for the U.S. Senate as a Republican from California to replace her husband, “Senator Robert McCallister,” played by Rob Lowe, who is stepping down after a heart attack.

Another episode will air tonight on ABC at 10 PM EST/PST, 9 PM CST.

• Record winter storms and revelations of warmist fraud notwithstanding, we "face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it."

• Unfortunately, "television" has replaced newspapers as the dominant medium.  And "television" serves as the tool of powerful forces favoring "unrestrained markets" and opposing regulatory "reform."  Though Gore stops short of naming television names, you don't have to read too hard between the lines to see that he's pointing the finger at Fox News in general and Glenn Beck in particular.

Nobel Laureate Al Gore was mocked Thursday at the Apple shareholders meeting in Cupertino, California.

As the subject of whether or not he should be reelected to the tech giant's board of directors surfaced, one longtime shareholder stood up saying, "[Gore] has become a laughingstock. The glaciers have not melted."

According to CNET, the gentleman then wisely said, "If his advice he gives to Apple is as faulty as his views on the environment then he doesn't need to be re-elected" (h/t Gateway Pundit via Glenn Reynolds):

Even when Chris Matthews attempts to side with the conservative/Republican position on an issue, he ends up either bashing them or praising Democrats, something he did three times on Wednesday's Hardball.

First up Matthews raised a GOP concern that Barack Obama should not speak in an "elevated" position, by using a podium, at the health care summit because it would present Obama as "standing up there like God" over them. [audio available here]

Later on Matthews appeared to defend tea partiers when he scolded Salon's Joan Walsh for using the term "teabag" which has a "sexual connotation" but just moments earlier accused conservatives of "leaping up and down orgasmically" over Scott Brown's win.

The Independence Party in Great Britain wants to ban Nobel Laureate Al Gore's fact-challenged schlockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth" from being shown in schools.

The British Telegraph reported Thursday: 

Following a number of scandals around the science of climate change, UKIP are promising to launch a Royal Commission led by a High Court judge to investigate whether global warming is man-made.

Wait. It gets better:

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:

On Monday's The O'Reilly Factor, FNC's Bill O'Reilly hosted a debate between global warming skeptic Joe Bastardi of Accuweather, and Bill Nye of PBS's Bill Nye the Science Guy, known for recently declaring that it was "unpatriotic" to dispute global warming. Bastardi argued that recent winter weather patterns are connected to El Nino, not global warming. He also linked sunspot activity to warming and cooling trends. Bastardi:

You want to bring up the CO2 argument. Why don’t we just look at the sunspots back here – back in 1750 – and notice that they’ve been coming up – and along with it the temperatures. Basically, it comes down to this: If you look at the strength of correlation to warming, and this is courtesy of meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, CO2 since 1895, you can see the .43, the sun .57, the oceans .85, but since 1998 CO2 has gone next to nothing because the Earth’s temperature is flatlining and CO2 is coming up.

He went to sum what he believed to be the implausiblity of the argument made by those who believe in global warming theory:

On Friday’s Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, Newsweek contributor Jerry Adler was shown reciting a poem in which he lamented all the agenda items that are unpassable because of the Senate filibuster rule that gives Republicans the power to block action by the Democratic majority. Host Maddow set up the clip: "Every week, Jerry Adler turns a story from the news into a verse for Newsweek. So now, without further ado, we present Newsweek`s Jerry Adler reading his latest opus, ‘59 to 41: Filibuster this Poem,’ with a special assist from our own Kent Jones." Jones playing the bongo was used as background music as Adler  read his poem.

Below is a complete transcript of the relevant segment from the Friday, February 19, The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC:

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.

The war between Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow continued Tuesday night when the MSNBCer told the Fox Newser to back off.

Maddow was responding to Beck's accusation on his radio show the previous day that she had intentionally omitted a key sentence of his during her attack on him last week.

During a nine minute segment designed to try to redeem herself in front of her tiny audience, Maddow refused to explain why she and her staff cut off an audio of Beck on Friday just as he was about to say something that would make her point totally absurd.

Instead, she filibustered ad nauseum with videos of previous programs without ever owning up to her shameful omission, after which she ridiculously concluded, "I didn't lie. Back off" (partial video and transcript below the fold):

Poor Barack Obama.  Hasn't put a foot wrong.  Policies just fine.  It's just that he's been dealt the cruel fate of . . . being President of the United States.

That was the essence of what Jonathan Capehart, WaPo editorialist, whistled past the liberal graveyard on Morning Joe today.  Confronted with the prez's crumbling poll numbers [by 52-44 margin people don't think PBO deserves to be re-elected], Capehart blamed anti-incumbent fever.  It's not that Americans are opposed to the Dems' policies, suggested Capehart: they're just frustrated by how little has been accomplished.

Why don't we play a little game of political prognostication?   Imagine that, far from being ineffective, Obama/Pelosi/Reid had managed to push through their entire agenda in the last year.  Let's focus on three matters:

The absolutely stunning global warming revelations this weekend by the man in the middle of the ClimateGate scandal have gone almost completely ignored by America's press.

As NewsBusters reported Saturday, Phil Jones, the head of the British Climatic Research Unit at the heart of ClimateGate, told the BBC: the recent warming trend that began in 1975 is not at all different than two other planetary warming phases since 1850; there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995, and; it is possible the Medieval Warm Period was indeed a global phenomenon thereby making the temperatures seen in the latter part of the 20th century by no means unprecedented.

Jones also admitted that he and his fellow scientists manipulated figures to hide a decline in crucial tree-ring data thereby questioning the validity of the entire global warming theory.

Despite the seriousness of these revelations, much as what happened when the ClimateGate scandal first broke, with the exception of Fox News -- and a lone report by CNN -- America's media have almost totally boycotted this amazing story:

Back to back Washington, D.C. blizzards prompted conservatives to mock the global warming crowd last week.

Grandchildren of Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., built an igloo on the National Mall and christened it "Al Gore's New Home." Fox News anchor Glenn Beck employed his trademark sarcasm to make fun of the "disappearance" of warming priest Al Gore and devotee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. since the snowfall. Beck picked on Kennedy because of a 2008 op-ed lamenting that global warming had changed the D.C. climate leading to "anemic winters."

Left-wingers online at place like Huffington Post and Daily Kos, as well as members of the national news media were furious that the "wingnuts" were using the blizzard to make fun of them. They rushed to defend their theory of man-made global warming (anthropogenic global warming or AGW) by claiming that the snowpocalypse was, in fact, caused by global warming.

"Science Guy" Bill Nye was so upset by it he attacked "unpatriotic" climate skeptics on Feb. 10 during the "Rachel Maddow Show" on MSNBC.

"To deny what scientists or scientific evidence is showing, is inappropriate. And as I said earlier, to me, when I get wound up, it's unpatriotic," Nye declared. But there are more questions than ever regarding the science. Prof. Phil Jones, formerly of the Climate Research Unit, admitted this week to losing track of climate change data used to support warming theory and that there hasn't been "statistically significant" global warming since 1995.