Weather

Al Gore must be a very, very unhappy man.

The New York Times published a piece Monday evening to appear in Tuesday's paper that exposed the really inconvenient truth that despite a rapid rise in carbon dioxide the past fifteen years, global warming has plateaued (emphasis added):

On Friday, three storm chasers were killed in Oklahoma when a tornado they were following made an unexpected turn in their direction.

Comedian Ralphie May on Sunday dishonored their deaths by tweeting, "Sometimes God just cleans the gene pool up":

CBS's Face the Nation Sunday spent fifteen minutes discussing climate change and amongst other things its impact on tornadoes - in particular the EF-5 that hit Moore, Oklahoma, last week.

As not one global warming skeptic was invited to participate in the panel, I've taken the liberty of getting opinions from some of the leaders on the realist side of the debate (video follows with commentary and full transcript of the segment at the end of the post):

Occasionally, we hear from people who believe that liberal media bias isn’t really that big of an issue because most people don’t really trust reporters to tell the truth. While public trust in the media is at an all-time low, that hardly means they lack the power to shape opinion.

A perfect case in point is the notion popularized by environmental alarmist Al Gore that the Earth is experiencing more severe weather events supposedly caused by “climate change.” Like his earlier debunked claims that global temperatures were increasing, this statement is also false. But many people are simply unaware of the facts.

If you were looking for righty-bashing blog posts related to the Moore, Oklahoma disaster, Daily Kos was the place to be this past Wednesday.
 
Ian Reifowitz argued that conservatives' childish hostility to government regulation boosted the tornado's death toll because neither state nor local law requires safe rooms or shelters, and that absent a mandate, such life-saving structures quite often won't get built.  Reifowitz wrote (emphasis added):

On Wednesday's CBS This Morning, open Obama supporter Gayle King strongly hinted to Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn that he would face voter backlash for seeking cuts in the federal budget to pay for tornado disaster relief: "You voted against relief plans for Hurricane Sandy, and it sounds that you would do the same if it was raised in Oklahoma. Do you worry about alienating your constituents?"

The Republican politician shot back that he didn't want the next generation to foot the bill for the recovery from the EF-5 tornado that devastated Moore, Oklahoma on Monday, and then strongly criticized the multi-billion dollar Hurricane Sandy relief package audio available here; video below the jump]:

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) wants any federal disaster relief sent to his tornado-ravaged state to be offset by other spending cuts, but CNN's Carol Costello thinks his stand to be either "extreme" or very untimely.

"This is either extreme fiscal responsibility or a raging case of 'this is not the time,'" Costello mocked on Facebook and Twitter. The Senator is sticking to his fiscal principles, since he has in the past demanded the same be done with federal aid to other states, but the liberal CNN anchor decided to inject her own bias into the story.

As NewsBusters reported, a deadly tornado stroke Oklahoma Monday.

At approximately the same time it was bearing down to kill innocent people, Lizz Winstead, the co-creator of Comedy Central's Daily Show, commented on Twitter, "This tornado is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives":

As NewsBusters has reported over the years, America's media love to hype every serious weather event.

On Monday, shortly after an F4 tornado demolished the town of Moore, Oklahoma, MSNBC's Martin Bashir called it "perhaps the worst tornado in the history of the planet" (video follows with transcript and commentary, file photo):

You would think university professors would have some respect for books regardless of their content.

Apparently that's not the case for two San Jose State University professors who actually published a picture at their department's website of the two of them burning a book skeptical of anthropogenic global warming.

When I saw the recently released PPP poll concerning America's belief in "conspiracy theories," I knew someone in the media would cherry-pick it to trash conservatives.

Living down to my lowest expectations was MSNBC's Chris Matthews who on Wednesday's Hardball chose to use the poll to attack Republicans as well as "the peanut gallery for Glenn Beck and company" without ever mentioning any Democrat responses (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Yesterday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s Now with Alex Wagner featured a discussion about the Keystone XL Pipeline, which is anathema to the environmental left, and which President Obama cynically delayed a decision on until after the 2012 election.  With the decision to approve or decline the project still looming for President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry -- who technically is the point person on approving the project -- Melinda Pierce of the Sierra Club was brought on the panel to discuss the pending doom we face with climate change, and disseminate the message that we can’t drill our way to energy independence.

To Wagner’s credit she did cite a piece from, of all things, Joe Nocera of the New York Times to give an alternative view to Pierce’s. Whereas Pierce responded by equating the approval of the pipeline to setting off a “carbon bomb”:

My review of previous NewsBusters posts relating to "Bill Nye the Science Guy" indicates that he's an atheist who doesn't think creationism should be taught in schools and, more pertinent at the moment, such an avid believer in "global warming" aka "climate change" that he believes those who doubt it or that it's caused by human activity are "unpatriotic."

Nye's belief in what I prefer to call "globaloney" appears to be based far more on faith than sound meteorological knowledge, given the alarming ignorance he expressed recently on MSNBC about the origins of the past week's snowstorms in the Northeast. Washington Post Weather Editor Jason Samenow ripped into Nye at the paper's "Capital Weather Gang" blog yesterday (HT Yid With Lid via Instapundit; links are in original; bolds are mine):

Another day, another iteration of the left-wing criticism of Al Gore’s sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera. On Thursday’s PBS NewsHour, co-anchor Jeffrey Brown interviewed the former vice president and, predictably, the sale of Gore’s television channel came up. Like Matt Lauer and Andrea Mitchell before him, Brown failed to question Gore’s decision to sell to a network with a history of espousing anti-American views.

Instead, Brown rehashed the hypocrisy question, even though he knew it had been asked before: [View video after the jump. MP3 audio here]

A truly shocking thing happened on the CBS Late Show Tuesday.

Host David Letterman actually challenged guest Al Gore about his recent sale of Current TV to al Jazeera saying, “So you, Al Gore, are doing business with this country that's enabling your ultimate foe of climate change” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It hasn't been a good few days for media members devoted to Al Gore's money-making scam called anthropogenic global warming.

Prior to Monday's revelation that heat from megacities is making for warmer winters on some parts of the planet, the Research Council of Norway issued a report last week titled "Global Warming Less Extreme Than Feared?":

America's climate change-obsessed media love to point to warmer winters in our country as proof of Al Gore's infamous money-making scam.

A new study from the journal Nature Climate Change reported by the Los Angeles Times Monday finds that in North America and Asia, heat from megacities is playing a larger part than anyone previously thought.

As Barack Obama enters his second term, his inaugural address delivered today, showed an undeniably strong shift to the left.  The mentions of climate change and gay rights were much more overt, and was music to the ears of liberal media cheerleaders. One such commenter, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, seized on the occasion to hail the president for noticing that we’re on the “frontier of climate disaster.”

Hayes was adamant that we’re at zero hour on this issue:

CNN media analyst Howard Kurtz isn't happy about Al Gore selling his failing Current TV to Al Jazeera.

In a piece published minutes ago at CNN.com, Kurtz elaborated while he missed potentially the greatest hypocrisy in the deal.

In case you missed it, there's yet another United Nations climate conference in progress, this time in Doha Qatar. At the Associated Press, there is a story on a protest which organizers want to characterize as a "march for peace" by "a few hundred" climate activists demanding "climate justice." The AP's Karl Ritter warns readers that "Dangerous (global) warming effects could include flooding of coastal cities and island nations, disruptions to agriculture and drinking water, and the spread of diseases and the extinction of species" -- even though there has been no net warming in 16 years. Another AP story suggest that "SOME WISH ISLAM WOULD INFORM CLIMATE DEBATE." I'll suggest that the referenced "some" includes a few AP and other journalists and almost no one else.

But there has been no room at the AP, as confirmed in a search on the world "climate" at the wire service's website at 3:30 p.m. ET and a review of possibly relevant articles, for discussion or even recognition of a November 29 open letter sent by over 125 scientists "qualified in climate-related matters" who have informed U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon that "there is no substantiation" for the so-called "science" undergirding the meeting's agenda (produced in full after the jump; bold is in original):

In a pompous commentary on his show “Up!”, MSNBC weekend host Chris Hayes unleashed what he must have considered a Greenhouse Gettysburg Address, as they pull the bodies of the lost from the clutches of Superstorm Sandy.

“There is something simultaneously awful and exhilarating about those moments when normalcy is suspended,” he proclaimed, and he must have tingled as he declared it essential that we need “a crash program right now to re-engineer the nation’s infrastructure” and “and an immediate aggressive transformation” of the nation’s economic system, before climate change kills more Americans. He insisted a vote for Obama and liberal Democrats was the only choice in a “you’re with us or against us” formulation on climate change casualties:

CNN's Piers Morgan lauded President Obama's "excellent" work during Hurricane Sandy, and teed up liberal guest Michael Moore to bash Republicans on global warming. As NewsBusters reported earlier, on his Wednesday night show he didn't once press Moore about his despicable anti-Romney ad.

Morgan gushed that "whichever side you're on, you cannot say that President Obama has not so far done an excellent job." That came after Moore took a shot at President Bush. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

In an appearance on CBS This Morning on Tuesday, the network's political director John Dickerson stopped by to briefly discuss the impact Hurricane Sandy could have on the upcoming election.

The segment was primarily focused on how the candidates will try to sensitively make up for lost time on the campaign trail, but there was an underlying question. Who stands to gain the advantage as a result? 

Politico promises readers who sign up for its subscription "Pro" service they they will have "No boring stories telling you things you already know."

Well, there's nothing more predictable and boring than stories about global warming and climate change which appear every time there's a major hurricane, serious flooding, or other weather-related catastrophe. Yet, as will be seen after the jump, the supposedly non-boring Politico Pro front page has two such stories in its top four.

If you had any doubts about the level of zealotry involved in today's global warming movement, they likely will be erased by the goings on at PBS the past few days.

Since allowing well-known climate realist Anthony Watts on NewsHour Monday to voice his views on this controversial issue, PBS has been under attack for doing so (videos follows with transcripts and commentary).

Mitt Romney recently took a trip to Louisiana to assess hurricane and flood ravaged areas, and to draw attention to the situation, possibly stirring people and organizations to help those in need.  During the course of his visit, Romney encountered a woman who had lost her home in the flooding.  Jodie Chiarello, according to a joint report from the Huffington Post and Associated Press, gave this account of her conversation with Romney:

"He just told me to, um, there's assistance out there," Chiarello said of her conversation with Romney. "He said, go home and call 211." That's a public service number offered in many states.

The severe drought affecting the Midwest this year has caused the latest corn projections to be the lowest since 1995. With such a small corn crop, the government mandates that make some of that corn be used for ethanol make even less sense, and will raise prices even further.

The drought has been a big news story for the network morning and evening show in the past six months, earning 55 stories about facets of the drought including struggling farmers, predictions of increased food prices and coverage of wildfires. That figure did not include weather reports that also often mentioned drought.