Environment

First, the United Nations publishes a children’s book to ignite fears in the world’s youth over global warming being the new bogeyman. Next, the Secretary General tells an environmental conference that the world’s developed nations should address climate change as seriously as they do weapons of mass destruction. Sounds like a Trey Parker and Matt Stone theme, doesn't it?

Well, hold on to your wallets sports fans, because Kofi Annan is on tour again spreading fear and gloom to the world largely on the backs of American taxpayers. As reported in an Agence France Presse article Wednesday (emphasis mine throughout): “UN chief Kofi Annan demanded that world leaders give climate change the same priority as they did to wars and to curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.”

Predictably, Annan didn’t miss an opportunity to suggest that this is all the West’s fault:

I guess we should have seen this one coming: the United Nations has published a children's book raising international fears about global warming. As announced this morning by the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works (emphasis mine throughout):

Nairobi, Kenya – A new United Nations children’s book promoting fears of catastrophic manmade global warming is being promoted at the UN Climate Change Conference in Kenya. The books main character, a young boy, is featured getting so worried about a coming manmade climate disaster that he yells “I don’t want to hear anymore!” The new children’s book, entitled “Tore and the Town on Thin Ice” is published by the United Nations Environment Programme and blames “rich countries” for creating a climate catastrophe.

The announcement continued:

In light of the recent scandlous allegations regarding evangelical leader Rev. Ted Haggard, many news outlets have been referring to Haggard as a "conservative." Only a small number are mentioning that Haggard also sees himself as a global warming activist -- and definitely not one of the "skeptic" variety.

Some liberal activists seem to be delighted at the prospect of Haggard's possible professional suicide, but liberals promoting the global warming theory know better. Temporarily at least, they've lost a major -- and perhaps irreplaceable -- ally.

I've collected a few citations for the benefit of those who were unaware of the direction of Rev. Haggard's environmental activism:

Julie Chen, co-host of CBS’s "Early Show," was more biased than the New York Times in reporting on a new global warming study conducted by the British government. Chen highlighted the inflammatory claims of the study, citing that it concludes "global warming will devastate the world economy on the scale of the World Wars." Yet, the New York Times, in its coverage of the report, did not note this claim, and even quoted an expert who called the study "a bunch of guesswork."

Chen classified this research as a "wake up call" and reported that British Prime Minister Tony Blair thinks emissions need to be cut, an allusion to the media line that humans are responsible for global warming. But, the science is far from conclusive that global warming is a manmade phenomenon as opposed to one that occurs naturally. But, then again, this would not be the first time CBS has sensationalized "man made" global warming while ignoring contradicting studies (click here and here for examples).

On Monday's edition of Oprah, devoted to "Moms Around the World," Oprah Winfrey talked to an Eskimo mom, Mary Swisher, about the challenging life in Kotzebue, Alaska, but Winfrey turned the conversation to how global warming is ruining an Alaskan town, and then pleaded for everyone in the audience to see Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, "coming out on DVD November 21st," because it warns that "millions of people are going to have to move" when the glaciers melt, "including Manhattan, where the water's gonna rise."

After talking to Swisher about the high cost of groceries in isolated Kotzebue, where the food is flown in daily, and exotic Eskimo cuisine, which Oprah refused to try on camera, she asked "So do you see evidence of global warming where you live?" Swisher said yes, that the residents of the town of Kivalina are going to have to move in the next year oir two since waves crash at their door and global warming has "eaten away their beach."

As my colleague Matt Sheffield noted yesterday, Newsweek has finally admitted they were wrong about global cooling in the 1970s.

The admission comes after Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) cited on the Senate floor, among other things, "Fire and Ice," a study by the MRC's Business & Media Institute about the media's 100+ year history of hyping climate change.

Here's a sample of the May 17 study pertaining to Newsweek's coverage from the 1970s.

Newsweek was equally downbeat in its article “The Cooling World.” “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically,” which would lead to drastically decreased food production, it said.

This story is just rich. After the efforts of Oklahoma Republican senator James Inhofe have brought greater public scrutiny to the media's global warming hysteria, Newsweek has finally admitted that, yes, it had played a big role in hyping "global cooling" back in the 1970s.

Despite this, though, you should believe the magazine and all the rest of the media who previously tried to scare up circulation numbers by predicting a global ice age because, well, this time they're right:

In April, 1975, in an issue mostly taken up with stories about the collapse of the American-backed government of South Vietnam, NEWSWEEK published a small back-page article about a very different kind of disaster. Citing "ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically," the magazine warned of an impending "drastic decline in food production." Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect "just about every nation on earth." Scientists urged governments to consider emergency action to head off the terrible threat of . . . well, if you had been following the climate-change debates at the time, you'd have known that the threat was: global cooling.

In Friday's Best of the Web Today column, Opinion Journal's James Taranto displayed how a major American metropolitan newspaper shows they can be soft on fire-bombing terrorism -- if it seems devoted to a fierce love of trees and turkeys.

"Jennifer Kolar and Lacey Phillabaum seem unlikely criminals," declares an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Well-educated young women passionate about environmental causes, they share a love of the outdoors and similar backgrounds.

Then we get some background on them. Both attended the same high school in Spokane, Wash. Phillabaum was "bright, outspoken, sometimes in-your-face but never dull." Kolar, who studies science, "had the makings of a good scientist, her adviser said, but her heart seemed elsewhere."

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers asked "Is God Green?" in his liberal campaign trilogy "Moyers in America" last week. Over at Businessandmedia.org, Rachel Waters noted that Moyers insisted that conservatives were only "mildly joking" with the hang-em-high bumper sticker "Support Environmentalists With a Rope." Catholic blogger Jimmy Akin tipped me off to another angle. One Christian expert Moyers used who was not bowing before Greenpeace, Calvin Beisner of the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, reported Moyers was very frank about his intention to boost Democrats into majority status: 

The bias of Moyers’s program is not surprising. He forthrightly told me before our interviews that he, as a liberal Democrat, hoped to use this program to divide the evangelical vote and return control of Congress to the Democrats in November's elections. The timing of the program’s release, therefore, is not surprising.

On Thursday’s program, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh responded to an environmental magazine’s call for Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for folks who speak out against Dr. Gore’s manmade global warming theories as reported by NewsBusters. First, El Rushbo expressed facetious concern about the likelihood of him "[being] in the top ten." He then elaborated that this is typical behavior of the left:

Now, this is who liberals are. They don't want to hear a viewpoint other than what they believe.

What follows is a full transcript of this segment, with an audio link.

Thursday's editorial "Doubting Inhofe," seems a bit defensive about Republican Sen. James Inhofe's recent scathing criticism of the media's over-credulous coverage of global warming -- perhaps because Inhofe cites the Times' history of bad coverage of the issue, including its mid-70s warnings of "global cooling," which are now as passe as Pet Rocks.

"In a recent speech in the Senate, James Inhofe of Oklahoma called himself 'the senator who has spent more time educating about the actual facts about global warming.' Too bad he is not the senator who has spent more time educating himself.

Oklahoma Republican senator James Inhofe is continuing his campaign to educate Americans about the media's tendency to listen and repeat alarmist rhetoric about the environment. His latest Senate speech focused on the New York Times and its prepostrous flipping back and forth between believing in massive global cooling/warming:

My recent speeches detailing the embarrassing 100 year history of the media’s relentless climate hype and its flip flopping between global cooling and warming scares must have struck a nerve in the old gray lady of the New York Times. A significant portion of my 50 minute Senate floor speech on September 25th was devoted to the New York Times history of swinging between promoting fears of a coming ice age to promoting fears of global warming. Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods.

The New York Times October 12, 2006 editorial accused me of possessing “a hysteria of doubt” about human caused catastrophic global warming. But in reality, there is no doubt that it is the New York Times that possesses a hysterical and erroneous history of climate alarmism.

Here is a quote from the February 24, 1895 edition of the New York Times reporting on fears of an approaching ice age: “Geologists Think the World May be Frozen Up Again.” But on March 27, 1933, the New York Times reported: “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise” Then in 1952, the New York Times was back on the global warming bandwagon declaring that the “trump card” of global warming “has been the melting glaciers.” And a 1975 New York Times headline trumpeting fear of a coming ice age read: “Climate Changes Endanger World’s Food Output.”

This is pretty extraordinary stuff, folks. The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works has just issued a majority statement about an environmental magazine advocating Nuremberg-like war crimes trials for folks that question the existence of man-made global warming:

A U.S. based environmental magazine that both former Vice President Al Gore and PBS newsman Bill Moyers, for his October 11th global warming edition of “Moyers on America” titled “Is God Green?” have deemed respectable enough to grant one-on-one interviews to promote their projects, is now advocating Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for skeptics of human caused catastrophic global warming. Grist Magazine’s staff writer David Roberts called for the Nuremberg-style trials for the “bastards” who were members of what he termed the global warming “denial industry.”

Amazing. The statement continued:

Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe appeared on Tuesday's "American Morning" to challenge CNN anchor Miles O’Brien over a previous report on the Senator’s global warming position. Specifically, this was in reference to a piece on the September 28 edition of the program that portrayed Inhofe’s skepticism on the subject as less than noble. O'Brien had asserted:

"Now we should point out in a recent five-year period, Senator Inhofe received more than $850,000 in donations from the oil and gas industries, his leading contributor. Inhofe challenged the media to get this story right, as he put it, but when we asked for an interview several times, we were told he is too busy to speak to us this week."

Inhofe did appear this week and he came ready to challenge the CNN host:

INHOFE: "Well, Miles, it's nice to be with you. I know you don't believe it, but it is nice to be with you....You know why? You always smile. So many of these extremists out there, they are mad all the time. But you're not; you smile. In fact, when you're cutting my guts out for two minutes last week, you smiled all the way through it. And I appreciate that."

Paul Chesser at the American Spectator blog notes an inaccurate, and purposefully ironic, AP headline. The headline creates a phantom event that is found no where in the body of the piece.

There's an Associated Press story out on the wire with the mis-titled headline, "Bush: Democrats shouldn't be trusted to run Congress." Of course since it's the AP, it's running on many news Web sites and will run in hundreds of print newspapers in the next day or so, with near-identical variations of the headline. ABC's affiliate here in Raleigh even puts the "Democrats shouldn't be trusted" in quotation marks, as though the president had literally uttered that statement.

I bring this up only because nowhere in the article is President Bush quoted saying such a thing. Maybe he did, but it's not in the story. In a different political environment (that is, pre-Foley) that headline would have been perfectly acceptable, because in the article the president is in effect saying Democrats can't be trusted with national security. But now that Foley has been exposed and the heat is on Congress, that headline portrays the Republicans as (even more) hypocritical by calling Democrats untrustworthy.

In a speech today on the floor of the Senate, James Inhofe (R-Okla.) blasted the news media for its bias on the subject of global warming. He also went after a completely one-sided report CNN aired on today's "American Morning" which portrayed him as a servant of the oil and gas companies with his out-of-the-mainstream views on the issue.

Below is a transcript of the CNN piece, filed by "Morning" anchor Miles O'Brien. Read on for Inhofe's remarks, including his disputation of O'Brien's assertion that the senator refused to be interviewed by CNN:

MILES O'BRIEN: In California, they're taking some tough action aimed at stopping global warming. The state imposing a cap on greenhouse gases. In the U.S., politicians have been slow to recognize global warming as a problem. Well, that is changing. An influential skeptic remains. No question, there is a political climate change inside the Republican Party. Arnold Schwarzenegger in San Francisco announcing with great fanfare, a California law to curb emissions of greenhouse gases at the root of global warming.

As you may have heard already, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) cited a recent study by the MRC's Business & Media Institute entitled "Fire and Ice," a look at the media's persistent bias and misreporting on global climate change.

You can see his speech at the Republican Senate Conference Web page. Just click here and then click on "Senator James Inhofe, Hot and Cold Media Spin Cycle: A Challenge to Journalists who Cover Global Warming" and "Senator James Inhofe on Media Hot & Cold Hype Since 1895."

Yesterday, Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma took to the floor of the United States Senate and gave a passionate and informed speech about Global Warming and the American media's coverage of it. He noted that

During the past year, the American people have been served up an unprecedented parade of environmental alarmism by the media and entertainment industry, which link every possible weather event to global warming. The year 2006 saw many major organs of the media dismiss any pretense of balance and objectivity on climate change coverage and instead crossed squarely into global warming advocacy.

Well, ABC's Good Morning America addressed the Global Warming issue this morning. One might think that the entire point of this morning's report was to prove Inhofe right.

A liberal is someone who will always be able to find the dark lining, so long as it's a Republican sun that's shining.  And so here's the latest dispatch from the No-Good-Deed-Goes Unpunished Directorate of the Department of Dark Linings:

Energy prices are down, maybe heading even lower . . . and that's bad.

So writes HuffPoster Raymond Learsy today.  He begins by citing that irrefutable authority, Al Gore, for the proposition that "we are near the tipping point of climatic catastrophe." He next bemoans that "never or at least rarely ever, has there been a serious discussion on curtailing the availability of gasoline."  By all means, I'd encourage Democrats everywhere to run on that platform!

Today's the last full day of astronomical summer, and so in a sidebar on the Metro page of the September 22 Washington Post, the paper gives its readers a few handy stats about the weather this meteorological summer (June 1-August 31).

[Meteorological summer is a convention commonly used to examine data that provides consistency from year to year rather than adhering to the slightly different dates for seasonal changes on the solstices and equinoxes.]

Anyway, in D.C. at least, it was only the 19th warmest on record, as recorded since 1871. What's more, the average temperature in summer was 78.5 degrees. Toasty, but not exactly scalding, except for the late July-early August heat wave, where 101 was the hottest temperature achieved in Washington on August 3.

Of course, it's the spikes in temperature, the heat waves, that the media latched on to to in order to mount the soap box on global warming.

As Mark Finkelstein reported earlier today, former Vice President Al Gore and billionaire CEO Richard Branson appeared together on Friday’s "Good Morning America" to discuss Branson’s decision to devote all the profits from his airline to combating global warming. Absent from the interview with Diane Sawyer was any mention of the scientific debate taking place over the cause of climate change, or whether, in fact, it actually exists.

While ABC ignored skeptics views of global warming, Fox’s "Special Report with Brit Hume" on Thursday highlighted one such doubter:

Brit Hume: "A leading climate expert from Colorado State University says the idea that humans are responsible for global warming is a fear perpetuated by the media, and by scientists trying to get grant money. Dr. William Gray is a noted global warming skeptic who says the current heating of the earth is part of a natural cycle."

This is shaping up as a day for lefty unilateralism.  As noted here, liberal LA Times columnist Rosa Brooks saw no nuance in her Bush-hatred fueled tirade against any expansion of permitted techniques in interrogating terrorists.

Later, Good Morning America staged a global warming love-in, in which nary a dissenting voice was heard and the only question was whether it was too late to implement Al Gore's costly nostrums.

Diane Sawyer's guests were Gore and British magnate Richard Branson.  The proximate cause was the announcement that over a recent breakfast, Gore managed to convince Branson to devote 100% of the profits from Virgin Airlines to the effort against global warming [someone check the OJ for Grey Goose].

ABC, CBS and NBC all ran stories Thursday night tied to Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson's pledge at the Clinton Global Initiative, held in Manhattan, to invest $3 billion to fight global warming by developing cleaner fuels. Doubts about global warming being driven by fossil fuels, naturally, were ignored. On ABC's World News with Charles Gibson, Kate Snow giddily concluded: “Branson says Al Gore gave him the idea for this initiative, but his real motivation was quite simple: To keep the world beautiful for his children.”

CBS's Katie Couric, however, spent the most time championing Branson's cause. She announced: “British mogul Richard Branson is vowing to fight global warming and he's putting his money where his mouth is. He has joined a growing list of billionaires who are donating to philanthropic causes, making a huge pledge today to former President Bill Clinton's Global Initiative. He is promising $3 billion over the next ten years.” Viewers then saw an interview with Branson, who proclaimed: “I don't want to be the generation that destroys this world for our children and our grandchildren.” Couric noted how Branson made his “fortune through the airline industry,” presuming it “does contribute, quite frankly, to global warming. Do you find it at all ironic that, that this is your main cause?” She cued him up: “When did you have an awakening about this issue? Do you remember a point in time where you had some kind of epiphany and said, 'I really need to get involved in this cause'?” (Transcript follows)

If you thought Al Gore would somehow go away after the 24/7 promotion of his lecture film "An Inconvenient Truth," you couldn't be more wrong. The failed presidential candidate is continuing to build his media empire with a follow-up book entitled "The Assault on Reason." He's going to use its commercial appeal to decide whether he should run for president or not, at least according to the Washington Post:

Although saying he has no plans to run for president in 2008, former vice president Al Gore has nonetheless left the door ever so slightly ajar. It's a good bet that door will swing open a good bit wider come next May.

That is when Gore is scheduled to publish his next book. With no fanfare, he signed a few weeks ago with Penguin Press to write "The Assault on Reason."

As described by editor Scott Moyers [any relation to Bill?], the book is a meditation on how "the public arena has grown more hostile to reason," and how solving problems such as global warming is impeded by a political culture with a pervasive "unwillingness to let facts drive decisions."

On Friday’s “Early Show,” CBS News correspondent Jerry Bowen offered a one sided global warming report. The story appealed to the emotions of viewers and only cited scientists who are alarmist on the subject. Bowen referred to specific findings and opinions offered by scientists who claim “man made” global warming is a threat, while only offering the reality that critics of man as the cause of global warming exist and not their opinions or research.

Citing NASA climate scientist, James Hansen, Bowen noted some frightening conclusions:

“He told a climate conference this week, ‘I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change, no longer than a decade at the most.’ If nothing is done, Hansen foresees a different world with rising seas that would put coastal regions under 3-20 feet of water, more heat waves, more prolonged droughts worldwide, and imminent extinction of animal species in the arctic, including polar bears...”

What would you call someone who, as per Project Vote Smart, within the last six years has received a 100% rating from NARAL and Planned Parenthood and a 0% from the National Right-to-Life Committee? A 100% rating from the ACLU. A 0% rating from Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. A 100% rating from the League of Conservation Voters and a 0% rating from the conservative Family Research Council?

Oh, and someone who voted against George W. Bush for president in 2004, against the confirmation of Sam Alito to the Supreme Court, and who demands the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq?

I'd call that person a liberal. Not MSNBC. Not Hardball. Not Chris Matthews's field correspondent David Shuster. The person in question is Republican-barely-in-name-only Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. How did Shuster describe him in a set-up piece for Hardball's discussion of the Rhode Island GOP senatorial primary this evening? A "moderate Republican."

This one definitely requires readers to put down all drinking vessels if they want to save their computers from devastating harm. Agence France Presse reported Monday that Australian Prime Minister John Howard has chosen not to meet with former vice president and Global Warmingist-in-Chief Dr. Albert Gore. Apparently, Gore wants to meet with the prime minister to discuss his controversial opinions concerning man-made gases – those not emanating from him, of course – causing irreparable damage to the world’s atmosphere.

According to AFP (emphasis mine), “Howard retorted that he did not take policy advice from films and said he would not meet Gore.”

Howard wasn’t the only Australian government official to diss Gore (emphasis mine):

Leave it to the Today show to find the negative side of good economic news. Reporting on the discovery of the largest oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, NBC's Martin Savidge admitted that "environmentalists might have a point," in worrying, "the discovery will hardly make a dent in America's reliance on foreign oil" and "it might cause Americans to stop conserving."

The following is the full segment introduced by Ann Curry:

Ann Curry: "Now to Today At the Pump and a major oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico. The average price of unleaded gas, nationwide, is now $2.72 a gallon according to the AAA. A steady drop over the last few weeks but drivers everywhere are wondering if the price of gas will drop even further with what could be the largest domestic oil find in 38 years. NBC's Martin Savidge has more on the potential of this new find. Hey Martin, good morning."

     Well, we don’t, but The Washington Post sure does. Remember Gaia – the crackpot idea that “Earth acts like a living organism?” The Post devoted more than 2,400 words to the theory’s creator today with his own loony end-of-the-world scenario.

     Yes, Al Gore fans, we’re all going to be crispy like some KFC dinner. James Lovelock says warming is “going too fast.” “We will burn.”

     The Post piece called “The End of Eden” is particularly well-timed. According to The Australian, “The world's top climate scientists have cut their worst-case forecast for global warming over the next 100 years.”