Global Warming

On Friday, MSNBC's Chris Matthews blamed the crisis in Egypt on George W. Bush and the Iraq war.

Two days later, climate alarmist extraodinaire Joe Romm blamed it on - wait for it! - global warming:

Chris Hayes, Washington editor of The Nation, appeared a bit befuddled Friday night when he sat in for Rachel Maddow on her MSNBC show.

First, here's Hayes talking about former West Virginia governor Joe Manchin, who was elected last fall to represent the state in the Senate (audio) --

HAYES: If you've heard of Joe Manchin, it's probably for one of three reasons. Perhaps you live in West Virginia. Mr. Manchin was the very popular governor of the great state of West Virginia and is now the state's junior senator after replacing the late senator Robert Byrd last year. Or if you followed this show closely last year, you might remember Mr. Manchin for his no vote heard 'round the world. The senator voted against repealing don't ask, don't tell. If neither of those biographical facts about Joe Manchin ring a bell, this one might. He approved and paid for what just might be the single greatest political ad of the 2010 election cycle --

The ad is then played (and can be seen here), with Manchin carrying a hunting rifle and saying this --

 On Friday’s World News on ABC, correspondent Linsey Davis filed a one-sided report in which she cited the views of climate scientists who blame the recent cold temperatures and high amounts of snowfall on global warming. After recounting the recent extreme weather around the country, Davis continued:

If this winter seems especially brutal, scientists say you're right. ABC News contacted 10 climate scientists to ask their take, if an extreme winter like the one we're having is the way of the future. The consensus? Global warming is playing a role by shifting weather patterns in unpredictable ways. Many say the forecast for the future calls for record-breaking precipitation and extreme temperatures year round. And that means winters with more snow.

The ABC correspondent concluded the report by noting the unusually cold temperatures in Boston:

In his report on the escalating dispute between the State of Texas and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, one thing you cannot accuse Ramit Plushnick-Masti of the Associated Press of being is a master of understatement. He claims that "Both sides and conservation groups agree the battle has put the health of Texas residents and the environment at risk."

Really? The only problem is that the AP reporter never found anyone who is currently on the Texas side of the dispute who is saying anything remotely resembling that.

Here are the opening paragraphs of Plushnick-Masti's prose, followed by a much later paragraph representing the closest the writer gets to naming someone on the Texas side to worry about the alleged "risk" (bold is mine):

In today's "Everything Is Caused By Climate Change" segment, the folks at Time magazine offer a howler destined to start your morning off right with a chuckle: "Holiday Blizzard: More Signs of Global Warming."

The contents were even more hysterical:

On the Wednesday, December 22, Nightline on ABC, inspired by recent extreme weather, correspondent Dan Harris filed a report on global warming in which he gave attention to the views of a proponent of global warming theory, while giving a lesser amount of attention to two skeptics, one of whom he labeled "controversial."

Harris related that, "despite all that compelling evidence" of global warming, climate scientists "feel more embattled than ever," taking heat from "politicians on the right." He even went so far as to highlight examples of reported harassment of climate scientists, including anti-Semitic insults.

Harris also concluded his report passing on a warning from scientists that there will be more "extremely deadly weather" in the future "if the world doesn’t act very quickly":

Corbyn is now predicting a mini ice age in the coming years. However, the vast, vast majority of climate scientists disagree and say, if you like this year’s extreme and extremely deadly weather, you’ll likely get much more if the world doesn’t act very quickly.

How could anyone oppose big government activism when both Michelle Obama and Elmo the Muppet favor it? It was unfathomable to Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt in his December 26 article 'How did obesity become a partisan fight?'

To a doctrinaire liberal like Hiatt, it's illegitimate to question whether government should be concerned with personal nutrition. Instead, he belittles opposing views with his snarky quips. "Could anyone really object to White House assistant chef Sam Kass trying to interest Elmo in a vegetable-laden burrito? Well, yes, if Michelle Obama is for it, someone will be against it. Someone like Glenn Beck, for example, who was moved to rail against carrot sticks, or Sarah Palin, who warned that Obama wants to deprive us all of dessert."

What Hiatt failed to realize is the real debate over excessive federal intervention where it doesn't belong. After listing some of the first lady's 'Let's Move' initiative, he said 'All of this makes total sense, and historians will marvel (much as they will at climate-change deniers) that anyone could doubt it.' And since global warming is the real cause of the winter blizzard according to the December 25 New York Times so it must be true, right?

The total inability of the far-left Fox News haters to conjure up any real controversy about the cable channel demonstrates just how reasonable and measured Fox's coverage generally is.

The latest Fox "scandal": DC bureau chief Bill Sammon told staff to refrain from pronouncing one side of the climate change debate unequivocally correct. That's right, Sammon's insistence that Fox not make definitive judgments on contentious political issues is a sign of Fox's unethical journalistic practices, the Fox haters bizarrely claim.

The occasion for the latest bout of anti-FNC bloviating was the leak of an email from Sammon, sent during the height of the so-called Climategate scandal. It read:

Media mogul Ted Turner, who founded cable networks CNN and TBS, wants a global child-bearing "cap and trade" system to combat climate change. He has thought up a bizarre take on China's one-child policy: set a strict one-child limit, and let poor people sell credits for children they don't have!

At the ongoing climate change summit in Cancun, Mexico, Turner told attendees:

...environmental stress on the Earth requires radical solutions, suggesting countries should follow China’s lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. He added that fertility rights could be sold so that poor people could profit from their decision not to reproduce.

After the New York Times decided to host scores of sensitive U.S. diplomatic documents released by WikiLeaks, a number of pundits, myself included, alleged a serious double standard. A year prior, the Times had refused to publish leaked emails in the so-called ClimateGate scandal. Environmental blogger Andy Revkin had this to say at the time:

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

Revkin has owned up to this double standard - sort of - in an update to that post. Noticed by the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, that update reads:

Chris Matthews, on Thursday's Hardball, assailed Republican Congressman John Boehner for, in his view, trashing the planet because the soon-to-be Speaker of the House announced the slashing of the House committee on global warming. Making fun of his smoking habit the MSNBC host derisively theorized that Boehner was going to treat the "whole planet" like he does his "ashtray."

The following Matthews outburst was aired during the "Sideshow" segment on the December 2 edition of Hardball:

(video after the jump)

During a congressional hearing in March 2009, manmade global warming skeptic Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) referred to God's promise in the the book of Genesis to never again flood the entire Earth as one reason why he is dismissive of global warming alarmists.

"The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood," Shimkus insisted, after quoting from Genesis 8:22.

Ever since then, the media have gone back from time to time to scoff at Shimkus's statement, citing his religious beliefs as reason he should not considered credible when it comes to challenging climate change science.

But if the media think that's fair game, shouldn't they apply the same standard to religious language employed by climate change alarmists like Christiana Figueres?

Here's something about which the environmentalists and car czars planted inside the Obama administration can't be pleased: as a percentage of their U.S. sales, Multi-Government/General Motors and Chrysler are selling more "light trucks," consisting of pickups, SUVS, and "crossover" vehicles than any other major manufacturer. Further, the companies are clearly emphasizing light trucks at the expense of their car models.

I wonder how a government promise to accomplish this would have been received by the fossil-fuels-are-awful media at bankruptcy crunch time last year?

You can pretty much count on this inconvenient product mix not getting a great deal of establishment press attention while it drools over the underpowered, heavily subsidized electric lemon known as the Chevy Volt and whatever toy disguised as a useful vehicle Chrysler/Fiat plans on foisting onto the market.

The detail is at the Wall Street Journal's monthly report on vehicle sales (link will change in one month). Key items include these:

Chris Matthews on Wednesday called Republicans that are skeptical of man's role in global warming Luddites, referring to the 19th century movement in Great Britain that was opposed to changes associated with the Industrial Revolution.

Clearly missing the absurdity in his analogy, the "Hardball" host arrogantly stated (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Wednesday's Today show NBC's Ann Curry managed to thread the theme of global warming through three different news stories, during her 9am news update. The co-anchor began by notifying viewers about the "wild weather" of record rainfall and tornadoes in the South to snow in the Midwest and then told her audience that "unusual weather seems to be a growing trend" as she delivered the latest bit of alarmism coming out of a climate conference in Mexico. Curry then wrapped up her update with a quirky eco-friendly news story about a Tokyo aquarium that is using an electric eel to light up its Christmas tree.

The following series of news briefs from Curry were aired on the December 1 Today show:

(video after the jump)

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):

As the long holiday weekend comes to an end, catching up with a humorous, seemingly spontaneous, moment on the last fresh Late Show before Thanksgiving. David Letterman is a big believer in cataclysmic predictions about global warming, but on Wednesday’s program his mom, Dorothy, rejected his proposition that global warming was to blame for some unseasonably warm days in Indianapolis -- prompting her disappointed son to shake his head in disapproval.

Dorothy, better known as “Dave’s mom,” appears annually from her kitchen in suburban Indianapolis to let her son guess the types of pies she’s baked for Thanksgiving. This year, the 89-year-old remarked “it's been unseasonably warm,” leading her son to assert “that's that climate change. It's the global warming. You know that, mom? Do you believe in the climate change, in the global warming?”

To which, Dorothy Letterman innocently responded: “Not really.”  (MP3 audio clip)

On Monday, NewsBusters was the first American media outlet to report Nobel laureate Al Gore's admission that he only supported ethanol mandates in the '90s because he thought it would help his presidential ambitions.

As it turns out, with very few exceptions, no major news divisions thought this was at all important:

Apparently the sophomoric folks at Newsweek are getting a bit giddy during the short work week leading up to Thanksgiving.

To accompany David Graham's November 23 The Gaggle blog post, Newsweek editors included a photo manipulation featuring the face of Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) on the body of Adam in Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam"

The photoshop was inspired by a March 2009 comment Shimkus made that reflects his religious beliefs, a comment that Graham apparently finds suitable for mockery and as evidence that Shimkus would be a poor choice to chair a committee that might deal with climate change-related issues and legislation:

Appearing in studio on the November 20 edition of "Fox & Friends Saturday," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted the one year anniversary of the ClimateGate scandal.

During one year of coverage, the three broadcast networks aired just 12 stories, an average of one per month, Bozell noted. What's more, the Media Research Center founder added, "when they do cover [ClimateGate], they dismiss" the gravity of the scandal or "use it as a way to buck up their original argument" about global warming.

For the full interview, check out the embedded video below the page break.

Nobel laureate Al Gore said this weekend that tax breaks for corn-based ethanol are "not good policy" and that he only supported these subsidies in order to assist his eventual run for president.

Reuters Africa reported Monday the former Vice President made these comments while speaking to a green energy conference in Athens.

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):

It’s been a year since thousands of emails and files were leaked from a prominent climate science group at the University of East Anglia, with startling comments including this one: “We can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment.”

Other leaked emails showed potential manipulation of temperature data, a willingness to destroy information rather than release it under the British Freedom of Information (FOI) law and the intimidation of publications willing to publish skeptical articles. The files also indicated that the temperature data was in a “hopeless” state.

Even though many considered it a huge scandal, the three broadcast networks didn’t think so. They ignored the story for roughly two weeks, and have only mentioned it in a dozen stories in the past year.

An Oxford University think tank is taking the media to task for not doing more to whip up a frenzy about global warming.

Apparently the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism crunched the numbers and found that "[l]ess than 10 percent of the news articles written about last year's climate summit in Copenhagen dealt primarily with the science of climate change."

The study lamented the attention that was given to the ClimateGate scandal.

Nearly a year after leaked emails from the University of East Anglia revealed scientists manipulating data to embellish the case for anthropogenic global warming, journalists are finally starting to learn a few lessons. Unfortunately, few, if any, of those journalists are Americans.

Margot O'Neill of the Australian Broadcasting Company reported last week:

[A] key BBC news manager has declared that climate science "isn't quite a settled question"; and the BBC Trust is investigating the impartiality of science reporting including on climate change and including whether sceptical views are given due airing.

They're back, they have their media water-carriers in place, and the Obama administration is smack dab in the middle of it.

The United Nations is pushing for countries in the developed world to keep their "promise" to, in the worlds of Charles J. Hanley at the Associated Press,  "raise up to $100 billion a year in new money for poorer countries to cope with climate change and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions."

It's as if ClimateGate never happened (link is to NB's 120-plus posts on the topic). It's as if the IPCC and others associated with the scandal and the evidence-impaired claims of global warming -- er, climate change -- uh, make that climate disruption -- still have their reputations totally intact.

Here is how Bloomberg describes the U.N.'s request: