Environment

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):

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):

Displaying a clear conflict of interest during Friday's 12PM ET hour on MSNBC, anchor Contessa Brewer did a story promoting electric car charging stations but did not disclose to viewers that the channel's parent company, General Electric, was selling the very same product. GE commercials for the charging stations have frequently aired on MSNBC in recent weeks.

Brewer began the segment, a part of NBC-Universal's "Green is Progress" week, by declaring: "Houston, the city known for gas pumps and oil gushers, is getting the nation's largest network of electric car charging stations." The company providing the charging stations was not General Electric, but rather NRG Energy. Brewer interviewed the company's president and CEO, David Crane.  

View video below

On Wednesday's Joy Behar Show on HLN, the host asked about parents who are "overpopulating" the world, and guest Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University professor, compared having a large family to littering, "as if we've got too many people on this planet to begin with." Fisher also bizarrely stated that "for billions of years, we [humans] ended up having one or two children per woman."

Host Joy Behar devoted the last two segments of her 9 pm Eastern hour program to how women are trending away from having children. Besides Fisher, she brought on author Rachel Shukert and Laura Scott, who manages the "Childless By Choice Project" blog. Near the middle of the second segment, the host blurred the line between typical large families, most of whom have children by natural means, and celebrities such as the "Octo-Mom" and Kate Gosselin and her family. This is where Fisher made her extreme leftist remark:

BEHAR: What about these people who are overpopulating- the Gosselins, the octo-moms- these people who have been vitro with hundreds of things in there- you know what I mean? What's up with that?

[Video embedded below the page break]

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.

 

On Sunday, NBC Universal launched its annual "Green Week," as part of the company's "Green is Universal" environmental awareness campaign.

As NBC embarks on yet another week of "environmentally themed programming," it falls to media watchdogs to point out the massive conflict presented by NBC parent company General Electric's significant financial interests in the policies "Green Week" indirectly advances.

GE stands to make millions from Democrats' "clean energy" agenda. The company has invested massive amounts of money in technology that can only be profitable through government intervention or subsidization.

During Monday's12PM ET hour on MSNBC, anchor Contessa Brewer helped promote the network's "Green is Progress" week by demanding greater government intervention to force people to follow an environmentalist agenda: "Until government says these are the standards that everyone has to aspire to, we're not really making progress."

Brewer made the comments while interviewing Practically Green CEO Susan Hunt Stevens and introduced the segment by touting the latest poll numbers on environmental awareness: "87% of Americans say they personally care about protecting the environment. 75% of Americans believe projects that protect the environment could also give us an economic boost....38% say the government should be most responsible for protecting the environment." However, she fretted people weren't making enough sacrifices: "...everybody says in a survey, 'oh, do you want to live greener? Do you personally care about the environment?' Yes. 'Are you willing to spend 25 cents extra in a federal gas tax that would definitely help improve the use of fuel?' Not so much."

View video below

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.

Thursday evening, NB's Ken Shepherd accurately pointed out how little establishment press interest there has been in prominently carrying an Associated Press report about how the Obama administration has been, in the words of the wire service's Dina Cappiello, "downplaying scientific findings, misrepresenting data and most recently misconstruing the opinions of experts it solicited."

This is not to excuse those who have given her report short shrift, but the AP and Cappiello herself did their level best to try to minimize the significance of what was to come in their headline and first paragraph, respectively:

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:

Wikipedia is the most popular source of written information in the world. It is the third most popular non-search engine site on the web, bested only by Facebook and YouTube. In other words, it can be a potent ideological force.

And it has been. The site's administrators recently banned 16 users from editing any article related to global climate change. One user, William Connolley - also an active member of the UK Green Party - had been editing misinformation and propaganda into Wikipedia articles since 2003.

If global warming is the modern secular religion, HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher has bought into it hook, line and sinker.

On the Oct. 8 broadcast of his program, immediately following a segment criticizing a congressional candidate that was a Nazis reenactor for exercising bad judgment, Maher ironically had some words of praise for the founder of al-Qaeda Osama bin Laden, who is believed to have ordered the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks which caused the deaths of over 2,700 people on American soil (video below the jump).

WARNING - VIDEO IS GRAPHIC.

Red is the new green, according to a horrific short film put together by global warming alarmists in Britain for 10:10 a "Global Day of Doing." Blood red that is.

The group 10:10 UK's "No Pressure" video advertisement that was intended to promote its cause begins with a teacher lecturing her students: "Just before you go there's a brilliant idea in the air that I'd like to run by you. Now it's called 10:10 - the idea is that everyone starts cutting their carbon emissions by 10 percent, thus keeping the planet safe for everyone, eventually."

Preaching global warming alarmism to children is nothing shocking, but the next part of the film was. The teacher singles out the two students who are skeptical about participating, presses a red button and BLAM! those children's bodies explode as blood and guts cover their classmates.

Skeptical soccer players, businesspeople and even actress Gillian Anderson all get blown up in the "disturbing" video for not complying with the wishes of the global warming crowd.

The violent depiction may be a new low for the environmental movement, but its violent rhetoric has been in use for years. Yet, the response from the liberal news media in the U.S. has been minimal, despite the willingness of the same outlets to portray - without a shred of evidence - conservatives as "incendiary" and violent.

As part of its week-long special report on "Big Green," the Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott wrote a piece detailing the cozy relationship - often brushing right up against unethical - between journalists, policymakers, and environmental advocacy groups.

The Examiner raises serious ethical concerns regarding a 2003 article in U.S. News and World Report that, according to Tapscott, continues to influence policy concerning the nation's fisheries.

The article, written by reporter Thomas Hayden, warns that "fish stocks are dangerously overexploited" and at risk due to commercial fishing. But nowhere in the article did Hayden disclose that he two of the primary sources for the had recently returned from a Carribean junket funded by a leading organization in the push for stricter environmental regulations, including on commercial fisheries. Nor did he mention that another 11 sources cited in the article received funding from that same organization.

Great Britain's leading scientific institution on Wednesday softened its position on manmade global warming.

In a document published after a rebellion by more than 40 of its fellows, the Royal Society's new guide to climate change says there is greater uncertainty about future temperature increases than it previously had suggested. 

As you might imagine, the following report from Britain's Times has climate realists all across the globe buzzing (subscription required):

It seems like every few years there's a new mascot for Team Global Warming. First it was the polar bear, then the Arctic fox and now it's the walrus's turn. On Monday's Today show, Lee Cowan traveled to Point Lay, Alaska to report on how shrinking ice sheets are leaving walruses stranded, in between their feedings, adding: "Much like the polar bear, they can't swim forever." In fact it didn't take long for Cowan to bring up the dreaded specter of global warming as he aired a soundbite of a local tribal president worrying: "I always thought the Arctic would be cold, but scientists tell us that there's global warming going on." Cowan even used another local resident to suggest that if something wasn't done soon, that in 10 years "we won't have any" animals.

The following is a full transcript of the segment as it was aired on the September 20 Today show:

Since Al Gore's schlockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth" came out in 2006, Americans have been deluged on almost a daily basis about the evils of a slowly warming planet.

On Thursday, USAToday.com surprisingly offered an upside to rising temperatures:

A new study out Wednesday in the British journal Nature finds that large, powerful North Atlantic ocean storms should actually become less frequent by the end of the century, due to climate change.

You mean there are actually positive benefits to fractional temperature increases every few hundred years?

Apparently so:

[Update, Wednesday, 11:15 pm Eastern: The Tweet by O'Brien apparently "doesn't exist" any more. A screen cap of the Tweet in question can be seen after the jump.]

Former CNN anchor Miles O'Brien (no relation to current CNN special correspondent Soledad O'Brien) slammed Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell as a "Tea Party nutbag" in a Tweet on Wednesday evening. O'Brien continued that he "forget [sic] her ignorant nonsense," referring to her defense of the creationist viewpoint during a 1996 appearance on his former network.

O'Brien, who was let go by CNN in 2008 after they closed their science unit, linked to an article on the left-wing website Talking Points Memo after his attack on O'Donnell. The article, by Eric Kleefeld, highlighted an item by Dan Amira of New York magazine, who "dug up" the Republican's March 1996 appearance with O'Brien and Dr. Michael McKinney of the University of Tennessee-Chattanoga. During the panel discussion, O'Donnell defended the creationism. Kleefeld labeled it as just another part of the social conservative's "religious right work," citing her apparent "long career in anti-sex and anti-masturbation activism."

A new school will be opening in Los Angeles next Monday that is named after Nobel Laureate Al Gore and Rachel Carson, the woman almost single-handedly responsible for DDT being banned in the '70s.

Even more delicious than the names associated with the new $75.5-million Carson-Gore Academy of Environmental Sciences is that it was built on land thought to be highly-contaminated with various chemicals which could pose a threat to students.

As the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday: