Global Warming

Elisabeth Rosenthal, an environment reporter who has blamed about every problem under the sun on global warming, called on China and India to turn off their air conditioners to save the planet in the Sunday Review – “Oh, to Be Warm In Summer’s Heat.”

Rosenthal's personal temperature preferences (she complains of shivering in air-conditoning crazy Hong Kong) are apparently to be locked in as global policy to fight greenhouse gases.

In the days leading up to Hurricane Irene's march through the Northeast,  journalists repeatedly suggested that the storm was yet more evidence of climate change.

"The scale of Hurricane Irene, which could cause more extensive damage along the Eastern Seaboard than any storm in decades, is reviving an old question: are hurricanes getting worse because of human-induced climate change?" asked the New York Times' Justin Gillis in his August 28 piece.

HLN guest host Don Lemon asked scientist Bill Nye on Wednesday if the storm was proof of climate change. Nye answered that it was "consistent with all the predictions of climate change models" and added that the United States is behind the times in taking action on climate change. "There's no other developed world country that isn't very concerned about climate change," Nye asserted, and ABC's weatherman Sam Champion agreed.

[Video below the break.]

Never let a natural disaster go to waste. In August 2010, New York Times environmental reporter Justin Gillis reacted to that summer's heat waves and flooding with “In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming” on the front page of the Times. So it was no surprise he took advantage of Hurricane Irene in Sunday’s edition, “Seeing Irene as Harbinger of a Change in Climate.”

Gillis’s latest story, admittedly written when Irene looked more dangerous than it turned out to be, was also guilty of disaster hype.

The scale of Hurricane Irene, which could cause more extensive damage along the Eastern Seaboard than any storm in decades, is reviving an old question: are hurricanes getting worse because of human-induced climate change?

Nobel laureate Al Gore claimed on Friday that scientists involved in advancing the theory of global warming wouldn't do it just for the money.

Without recognizing the hypocrisy, he also told FearLess Cottage consumer advocate Alex Bogusky that scientists espousing a skeptical view of his money-making theory are exclusively doing so for their own financial benefit (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The media must really believe Rick Perry can defeat their beloved President Obama for they are coming at the Texas governor with guns blazing.

On Tuesday, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen likened Perry to the late Sen. Joe McCarthy because of his disbelief in manmade global warming:

Right-leaning New York Times columnist Ross Douthat was thrown into the David Brooks chair on the weekly political roundatable on NPR's All Things Considered Friday. NPR anchor Robert Siegel insisted Rick Perry had a whole set of strange and anti-scientific statements that suggest he's "too far right" to be electable. Notice how NPR just rolls up everything they disagree with and loads it into one question for the "conservative" panelist:

CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, filling in on Face the Nation, just couldn’t comprehend how a candidate espousing true conservative views could possibly capture the White House. Referring to Rick Perry, she demanded: “Can the Republican Party elect someone President who doesn't believe in global warming?”

She described Perry’s fairly conventional conservative assessment of Social Security as “controversial,” citing how in his book he described the program as “a crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal,” a “bad disease” and that “it was set up like a, quote ‘illegal Ponzi scheme.’” Repeating her earlier formulation, O’Donnell wondered: “Can you elect a Republican to the White House who thinks Social Security is a bad disease?”

Unemployment is at 9.1 percent, housing and stock prices are plummeting, national debt is exploding, and Medicare is going bankrupt.

Yet MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews' greatest fear is a president that doesn't believe in evolution or climate change (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Times reporter Ashley Parker’s profile of Texas Gov. Rick Perry on the campaign trail in New Hampshire portrayed a more cautious and subdued candidate, days after Perry’s claim that actions taken by Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, were potentially “treasonous,” a remark that offended the delicate sensibilities of Times reporter Binyamin Appelbaum, who found it simply “horrifying.” Parker's Thursday piece from New Hampshire, “Day After Fed Uproar, Perry Tones It Down," featured six paragraphs on an exchange on global warming between Perry and N.H. citizen Jim Rubens, described by Parker as a “a Republican activist and high-tech investor from Etna."

But Rubens is also a consultant with the left-wing environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists, a fact Parker didn’t include but which found its way into the Los Angeles Times: “One of his questioners was Jim Rubens, a Republican from the village of Etna who works as a consultant for the Union of Concerned Scientists.” UCS, which was formed in 1969 to protest the Vietnam War, has lobbied against Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") and nuclear power.

World News' Diane Sawyer on Monday hyped a disaster at a rock concert in Indianapolis as an example of "weather gone wild" and linked it to global warming. Hyperbolically connecting the tragedy to other weather events, she proclaimed, "Something strange going on around the globe."

The anchor teased the segment by warning, "And tonight, the weather gone wild. Winds that come out of nowhere. Floods swelling streets. Heat breaking records in all 50 states. Snow where it hasn't fallen in decades." The program also hid the identity of a global warming activist. [See correction below.]

[See video below. MP3 audio here.]

On Monday's NBC Today, correspondent Martin Fletcher reported on a deadly polar bear attack in Norway and explained: "The attack began at dawn with a bear looking for food....it's believed that with global warming, food is scarce. A post-mortem showed this polar bear was 110 pounds underweight, with almost no fat reserves. It must have been starving."

Fletcher began the report by declaring: "And today in the Arctic Circle, one of the most beautiful and hostile places on the planet, it's warmer than usual. There isn't much food for the polar bears. So when a group of British youngsters on a wildlife adventure trip set up camp for the night they became bait for a bear."

Global warming, aka climate change, is the scapegoat for everything from record snowfalls to disastrous tornadoes. As such, it is also the perfect route for governments to closely control their citizens by regulating the smallest of details, like which lightbulbs they are allowed to use, to supposedly fix the problem.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who grew up under totalitarian rule, is speaking out against what he sees as the latest government attack on democratic freedom, environmentalism, which he argues closely parallels the thefts of freedom under communism. Do you agree with him? Let us know what you think in the comments.

You can't make this up.

You might excuse the Associated Press for engaging in a bit of hyperbole in a Friday item headlined "Northeast braces for temps near boiling point." After all, it has been miserably hot in many parts of the country, including here in Greater Cincinnati.

But, as readers will see after the jump, the unbylined AP item's writer clearly doesn't understand the point at which water boils. Brace yourself (light-blue "highlighting" is mine; HT to an NB tipster):

All last week, global warming-obsessed media were rife with reports about record-breaking heat.

Problem is, according to the National Climatic Data Center, and marvelously reported by the Hockey Schtick Sunday, almost no temperature records were actually broken:

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday mocked news outlets hyping the heat wave gripping much of the nation by reporting the heat index rather than the actual temperatures.

On Friday's "Real Time," host Bill Maher proved Limbaugh's point by falsely telling his audience, "It was 123 in Minnesota" (video follows with transcript and commentary, vulgarity alert):

Bill Maher on Friday once again got caught in his own hypocrisy.

As HBO's "Real Time" host waxed philosophic about socialism and "shared sacrifice" for the good of the country, Reason TV's Nick Gillespie stumped the sometimes comedian by asking if he would give up his cars or his television show to reduce his carbon footprint (video follows with transcript and commentary):

British media mogul Rupert Murdoch has spent the past few weeks facing ethics inquiries as a result of his News of the World phone hacking scandal. Now British-government-owned media giant BBC is being questioned for its journalistic ethics in muzzling global warming skeptics in its taxpayer-funded broadcasts.

Because BBC believes skeptics' views "differ from mainline scientific opinion," the network plans to reduce airtime to the "minority" views. The Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank that serves to challenge the costly environmental policies countering a possibly fabricated problem, describes the attack on skeptics as "using the 'science-is-settled' mantra as a smokescreen to silence critics of climate taxes and green policies." Coming from a government-funded network, the political agenda the network is trying to push should be making the same headlines the News of the World scandal has created.

In April 2009, climate realist Christopher Monckton, a former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was invited to testify before Congress about global warming alongside Nobel laureate Al Gore.

The following video of a debate that happened in Australia Tuesday will perfectly demonstrate why Monckton, after he had arrived at Reagan International Airport in Washington, D.C., was informed that House Democrats refused his appearance at the hearing:

Appearing on fellow MSNBCer Ed Schultz's radio show yesterday, Chris Matthews waxed apocalyptic about what he believes will be a dire consequence of climate change.

Matthews told Schultz of an unidentified friend in Alaska, presumably not Sarah Palin, who warned him of what's to come from warming temperatures  (audio) --

Nobel laureate Al Gore must be noticing the public's continued lack of concern for his money making myth about carbon dioxide destroying the planet.

On Tuesday, he announced a new campaign and worldwide event to re-energize global warming hysteria:

Bill Maher on Friday proudly equated the Casey Anthony verdict with Republican thinking.

Unfortunately for him, conservative author Ann Coulter was present, and when she got the chance to respond during the internet-only Overtime segment of HBO's "Real Time," she nicely exposed some of the host's most delicious hypocrisies (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Over the past three years, the number of believers in anthropogenic global warming has been on a steady decline, while the number of believers in natural planetary warming and cooling cycle has been on a steady incline. The shrinking pool of people who still swear by Al Gore's Hollywood version of the climate trend is especially populated with journalists and politicians who refuse admit they were wrong and consider any science debunking manmade global warming.

As the numbers fail each year to match Gore's wild predictions, it is becoming increasingly difficult to form any logical support for Gore's gloom and doom global warming scenarios. To rectify the situation, the global warming community has quietly rebranded its cause as 'climate change,' which allows activists to push an environmental agenda without the threat of the earth's temperature not rising with it.

Foreign affairs expert Walter Russell Mead wrote a fabulous piece in "The American Interest" Friday that should be must-reading for those on both sides of the global warming debate - especially members of the Al Gore-loving media.

In "The Failure of Al Gore," the registered Democrat and Obama supporter listed the reasons why the former Vice President has actually been a terrible leader for the green movement, and why a "fawning establishment press" have aided and abetted his disgrace:

Obama’s pro-Israel critics are talking “pure crap,” said New York Times columnist Tom Friedman on PBS host Charlie Rose's show Tuesday night. Rose was hosting a roundtable of Times columnists. Along with Friedman there was David Brooks, neo-liberal economics columnist David Leonhardt, and Roger Cohen, foreign policy columnist and once a stout defender of the authoritarian regime in Iran.

As the “conservative," Brooks mostly agreed with the three liberals, calling himself “an admirer of Barack Obama” while offering mild criticism of the president’s “passivity.”

Meanwhile, fellow columnist Thomas Friedman got physically agitated during a sarcastic, self-righteous rant on global warming skeptics like Rush Limbaugh. Friedman also confessed to having voted for Obama (a bit of a no-no under Times' guidelines) and later employed a blunt word to describe Obama’s pro-Israel critics. Here’s his impassioned, physical soliloquy on climate change, about eight minutes into the program:

Chris Matthews on Wednesday made it clear that like Al Gore, he believes the media should only be telling one side of the story when it comes to manmade global warming.

Such came out in the middle of a discussion about Gore's new article in Rolling Stone magazine when the "Hardball" host told his guests, "I hate that so-called evenhanded so-called objective journalism" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

A frothing Chris Matthews on Wednesday excoriated Rush Limbaugh as "evil" for spreading "lies" about global warming.

The Hardball host highlighted a new Rolling Stone article by Al Gore that chides Barack Obama for not doing enough on climate change.

Matthews, however, chose to attack Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh: "These people are evil in what they're doing. I'm not saying their souls are evil, but what they're doing is really, really wrong and it's not the President." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Debuting in theaters this Friday, the seemingly innocuous Disney-Pixar film 'Cars 2' has become a tool to wedge a fight against fossil fuels in favor of alternative forms of energy.

When John Lasseter moved from executive producer to executive director last year, he overhauled major portions of the plot into a good vs. evil story against big oil.

During a fluffy human interest story on Wednesday's NBC Today about a man in Holland who built a full-size replica of the biblical Noah's Ark, correspondent Janet Shamlian turned serious for a moment, wondering: "But how realistic is this Dutchman's dream of doom? Because of global warming, the concept of a flood happening here is not unheard of." [Audio available here]

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