Global Warming

New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane on July 29 introduced The Agenda, a special online campaign section that promises to put the "big issues" on the table and "outline potential solutions." Brisbane hoped the special online section would "elevate debate" on substantive issues, but so far it's functioning as an excuse for reporters to call for liberal solutions to imagined problems like income inequality and climate change.

Environmental reporter John Broder is covering climate change in the "Planet" section, under the opinionized subhead "The lagging U.S. response to climate change." His August 3 entry, "Who Are Your Sources?," featured a silly photo of Glenn Beck from his former Fox News show as a supposed example of where climate change skeptics get their information.

UC Berkeley professor Richard Muller has become a media darling now that he believes in global warming as a result of a study he led on the subject funded by the Koch brothers.

With this in mind, CNN's Fareed Zakaria must have been shocked by what Muller told him Sunday after he asked his guest, "Were [the Kochs] disappointed by the results of your research or have they asked for their money back?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

So eager are the shills at the George Soros-funded far-left website Think Progress to find evidence of global warming that on Thursday they falsely blamed melting street lights in Stillwater, Oklahoma, on the heat.

As originally reported by TP's Stephen Lacey:

I suppose the Associated Press deserves some credit for what appears to be a grudging acknowledgment that opponents of the oil and gas drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, aka "fracking," "sometimes mislead the public." Also, Kevin Begos's story does a good job of letting Josh Fox, producer of the fundamentally dishonest documentary "Gasland," hang himself with his own dodgy, reality-denying words.

But the credit pretty much ends there. Begos's report is a largely a study in false equivalence (y'know, everybody exaggerates -- except, Kevin, opponents do so serially while proponents do so rarely) and psychobabble (y'know, everyone uses "facts" they like and ignores the one that don't -- except, Kevin, for the inconvenient reality that opponents' "facts" are largely falsehoods). The problem is best exemplified in the final excerpted paragraph which follows the jump (bolds are mine):

The Jurassic Press is missing much in their reporting on the $50 billion bailout of General Motors (GM).  The Press is open channeling for President Barack Obama - allowing him to frame the bailout exactly as he wishes in the 2012 Presidential election. 

The President is running in large part on the bailout’s $30+ billion loss, uber-failed “success.”  And the Press is acting as his stenographers.  An epitome of this bailout nightmare mess is the electric absurdity that is the Chevrolet Volt.  The Press is at every turn covering up - rather than covering - the serial failures of President Obama’s signature vehicle.

Wednesday's CBS This Morning hyped a "groundbreaking" new report from federal government scientists that claims "the first-ever statistical connection between extreme weather and man-made climate change." Correspondent Wyatt Andrews spotlighted how the study "found that man-made heat made the Texas drought roughly 20 times more likely."

Andrews also hinted a connection between climate change and a recent heat wave, even as he explained that "the biggest reason for the record heat is the transition...from the La Nina weather pattern...to this year's warmer pattern, El Nino."

On Tuesday night, all three network evening newscasts ran with stories on a newly released government report blaming man-made climate change for recent extreme weather. ABC's World News led the charge, as anchor Diane Sawyer sounded the alarm: "Hot planet. The world is heating up. And for the first time, a U.S. Government-backed report ties that searing heat, those epic storms, to man-made global warming."

Sawyer cited a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a "major alert about the speed of climate change on this planet" and wondered if the study represented "a tipping point" on the issue. Turning to weather editor Sam Champion, Sawyer hoped there was "still time to do something." Champion proclaimed: "I would say is, now is the time we start limiting man-made greenhouse gases if we're starting to see that that is exactly what other studies are showing."

In the past several weeks as much of the nation suffered under a massive heatwave, global warming-obsessed media depicted the high temperatures as evidence of Nobel laureate Al Gore's favorite money-making scam.

A new study published in the journal Nature Sunday completely debunks all previous claims that temperatures in recent decades are in any way historic demonstrating instead that things were much hotter on this planet during Roman times:

Journalists have been reeling from the realities of new media. No longer can they pretend their actual reporting lacks bias. Spun news stories, bogus video editing, lies and false statistics all make up the daily news diet.

But author Christopher C. Horner is proving that journalists out themselves long before a story even gets written. Horner, whose upcoming book “The Liberal War on Transparency: Confessions of a Freedom of Information 'Criminal'” comes out in the fall, just skewered New York Times’ lefty climate “reporter” Justin Gillis in a new piece for the DC Examiner.

Now that Colorado is enduring one of the worst wildfires in its history, liberals are pointing to man-made global warming as the culprit. On Thursday's NBC Nightly News, correspondent Anne Thompson hyped the "dire" and lasting impact of the fires on the environment and pointed toward man-made global warming as the probable cause.

The "increasingly bigger" fires, Thompson said, are "Leading some to question if this wildfire season is worse because of climate change." One of her experts, a professor from the University of Arizona, proclaimed that “we won’t see these forests coming back in our lifetime or even our grandchildren’s life times.”  [Video coming soon.  MP3 audio here.]

If it weren't so distortive of the political system, liberal media bias would be downright hilarious, particularly when it's manifested in journalists' ability to turn on a dime and engage in rhetoric that they previously condemn when used by others. 

You can't help but smile after reading Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein's attempt to blame a few windstorms and hot weather on global warming (oops) climate change despite repeated proclamations during colder weather that "climate is not weather." None of that matters to Borenstein who procedes to write nearly 900 words of pure speculation as he warns us of the dangers of ManBearPig.

CNN's Carol Costello told guest Bill Nye "The Science Guy" on Monday that climate change skeptics are "politicizing this issue" and "winning." Of course, the two did not admit to the possibility of man-made climate change believers doing the exact same thing.

"But the people who are politicizing this issue, they seem to be winning because not much is being done on the issue of climate change even though President Obama promised that, you know, back in the day, 2008," Costello said. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Here’s more proof that the media cynically use the environment as a hammer to whack Republicans: the non-existent response of ABC and muted comment by The New York Times about Obama’s refusal to attend a major environmental conference, contrasted with their fury 10 years earlier over a similar decision by President George W. Bush.

President Obama is not attending the United Nations Environmental Conference on Sustainable Development, informally known as Rio+20, scheduled from June 20 to June 22. Rio+20 seeks “to secure renewed political commitment for sustainable development, assess the progress to date and the remaining gaps in the implementation of the outcomes of the major summits on sustainable development, and address new and emerging challenges.”

At the rate things are going, it may be that the list of leading West Virginia Democrats attending the party's convention in Charlotte is going to be shorter than the list of those who aren't.

The Associated Press reported the following in an unbylined item this evening in a terse three-paragraph squib with some pretty amusing attempts at impact-minimizing verbiage (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

It may be a fluke, but it seems too coincidental. What it may be is a leading indicator that the establishment press and international advocates of global wealth redistribution have figured out that "global warming" and "climate change," its deceptive substitute term, have lost their luster thanks to a lack of scientific rigor, scandals, and deception.

What I'm referring to is the fact that in reviewing three Associated Press items which would appear to have been opportunities to bring up the topic of "warming" and "climate" in connection with the U.N.'s latest "earth summit," none of them contained either word. It seems that "sustainable development," a term which has been around for a while and which basically means "stopping most development regardless of merit," is now the go-to term when one wishes to avoid the aforementioned W-word or C-word.

Effete MSNBC host Chris Hayes, in a new Lean Forward commercial airing on the network, can be seen merrily biking around New York City while lecturing Americans that climate change is "the biggest governing challenge I think we've ever faced."

The cable anchor, who on May 27th infamously said he was "uncomfortable" calling fallen military members "heroes," pranced around the city as his voice-over pontificated: "...The scale and scope of [fighting global warming] is every bit as transformational as the industrial revolution or the transition to the digital age." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

CNNMoney mustn’t pay very well, because writer Steve Hargreaves is moonlighting as a PR flack for the International Energy Agency. At least, that’s the impression given by his June 12 article on the IEA’s 700-page "sharply-worded" report that called for an additional $36 trillion of clean energy investment by 2050. 

According to Hargreaves, IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven doesn’t think governments are doing enough to keep global warming in check. “Our ongoing failure to realize the full potential of clean energy technology is alarming,” she said. “Under current policies, both energy demand and emissions are likely to double by 2050.”  

Justin Gillis, the New York Times' s alarmist environmental reporter, was at it again in a post to the paper's "Green" blog, "Are We Nearing a Planetary Boundary?"

Gillis's preoccupation with the alleged dangers of overpopulation and overuse of natural resources are reminscent of the alarmism created by Paul Erlich's book The Population Bomb, which notoriously predicted in 1968 that 65 millions Americans would die of starvation in the 1970s (more like dieting).

Searches on "Government Accountability Office" (not in quotes), "shale," and "mittal" at the Associated Press's national site return nothing relevant to the energy-related story which will follow. A Google News search on "Anu Mittal," the person from the GAO who on Thursday testified before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology`s Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, appears to return seven relevant items, but it's really five. The first is a press release from the Luddite (aka Democratic) members of the committee pooh-poohing the importance of Ms. Mittal's assertions. The other four are from non-major and/or non-establishment press sources: Newser, American Thinker, Daily Markets, and the Inquisitr (yes, spelled correctly). Only one other news outlet I'm aware of, Media Research Center's CNS News, has also noted Ms. Mittal's testimony.

What Ms. Mittal had to say is that, according to a leading research organization, just one area overlapping three states in the West (not the Midwest, as a couple of the other links assert) has an astounding quantity of recoverable oil:

Debunking Nobel laureate Al Gore's favorite money making scheme is "divisive and toxic."

So said New York Times writer Andrew Revkin during a talk last week at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as reported by the Santa Barbara Independent Tuesday:

The New York Times's confessed climate activist (and journalist) Justin Gillis made Tuesday's front page with a 2,500-word story on what he called the last line of defense for climate change skeptics: "Clouds' Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters."

Gillis, a true believer, proudly told the Columbia Journalism Review in April that it was a "scandal" the media was failing to connect the dots between "weird weather" events and permanent climate change, and compared climate-change skeptics to people who don't believe in evolution.

There have been all kinds of reasons given for the increasing number of home runs in baseball over the decades including more tightly-sewn balls, steroids, improved fitness training programs, and bat technology.

On Saturday, renowned Fox sportscaster Tim McCarver blamed it all on Al Gore's favorite money-making scam (video follows with transcript and commentary):

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter put on his climatologist coat in his Saturday Business Section story on a controversy ginned up by left-wing climate change activists, who are complaining a new Discovery Channel documentary isn't alarmist enough: "No Place for Heated Opinions – Discovery's 'Frozen Planet' Is Conspicuously Silent on Causes of Climate Change." Stelter insisted that "The vast majority of scientists agree that human activities are influencing changes to the climate...and believe that the situation requires serious attention."

When conservative televangelist Pat Robertson sees God's wrath against sexual sins as the cause for devastating natural disasters, it's roundly mocked by the liberal secular media. How dare Robertson presume to speak for God, many huff. But the Left's double standard is no more evident than yesterday when the Washington Post's website published an Earth Day "On Faith" column by a liberal theologian who chalks up "climate change" to God's anger for our "sin against the planet."

Make no mistake, "She [sic] is very, very angry about" our carbon emissions, thundered Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite from her electronic pulpit as she charged Christians to be equally righteously indignant in her post "A new Earth Day theology":

ABC reporter and global warming enthusiast Bill Blakemore on Sunday condescendingly dismissed climate change skeptics as "denialists." In a piece on ABCNews.com, he called for yet more advocacy on the part of journalists.

After noting that confidence in the science of climate change has varied from year to year, Blakemore huffed that these beliefs "don't seem to be responding all that much, [Professor Jon Krosnick] says, to whatever the global warming denialist campaigns may have been doing."