No matter what former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin does, she's not going to win any friends in the mainstream modern feminism activist movement in the United States. But that might not be a bad thing.

On HLN's Feb. 8 "The Joy Behar Show," Eve Ensler, the writer of the infamous "The Vagina Monologues" appeared on the broadcast to promote her new book "I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World." During the interview, she was asked by the show's host Joy Behar what she thought about Sarah Palin, her political prospects and her belief system.

"Back with me is a woman who has done more for the vagina than the Brazilian wax - the talented Eve Ensler," Behar said. "You know, I must talk about Sarah Palin quickly with you because you do mention her in one monologue in the book. And you say a woman running for U.S. vice president believes in creationism but not global warming. What were you driving at there? May I ask?"

With Washington, D.C. buried beneath at least 20 inches of snow, and with more in the forecast, common sense would suggest global warming alarmists look elsewhere to make the argument to raise awareness for their concerns.

But no, Dylan Ratigan thinks it's ridiculous to suggest all the snowfall totals could cast doubt on the theory of anthropogenic global warming. On MSNBC's Feb. 8 "The Dylan Ratigan Show," Ratigan criticized those who would dare express misgivings about climate change based on the so-called "snowpocalypse."

"Here's the problem - these ‘snowpocalypses' that have been going through D.C. and other extreme weather events are precisely what climate scientists have been predicting, fearing and anticipating because of global warming," Ratigan said.

One of the reasons many people watch the Super Bowl is for the ads, and one that surely will be talked about at watercoolers Monday is Audi's Green Police commercial.

In it, ordinary citizens are arrested for using plastic instead of paper, throwing away batteries, not recycling orange rinds, possessing incandescent light bulbs, and setting their hot tub thermostats too high all while Robin Zander sings refashioned lyrics to Cheap Trick's '70s classic "The Dream Police."

To give you an idea just how scary this futurist vision of environmentalism running amok was, even the New York Times found it "misguided" (video embedded below the fold, h/t Seton Motley):

On Thursday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Katie Couric lamented the impact ClimateGate and other recent scandals involving fraudulent global warming data have had on the climate change debate: “Experts insist the overall conclusion remains the same, that climate change is real, but...such errors provide ammunition to skeptics.”

In a report that followed, correspondent Mark Phillips cited accusations of data tampering against Penn State University climatologist Michael Mann, but explained: “An academic board today cleared Mann, saying his science holds up, but the damage may have already been done.” Phillips went on to detail other data errors, including a false United Nations climate panel report on melting Himalayan glaciers and the ClimateGate scandal at Britain’s East Anglia University.

Phillips observed how the “series of gaffes by climate change scientists,” has created “a frustrating time for those who believe the basic science in global warming remains true.” A clip was then played of Imperial College London climatologist Brian Hoskins fretting: “it appears the whole edifice has been undermined by these couple of bricks that are flaking a bit.”

Phillips concluded his report by explaining the real problem facing global warming advocates: “The scientists may still believe they’re winning the scientific argument, but they’re in danger of losing the public relations war.”    

In the 8:30AM ET half hour on Tuesday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Maggie Rodriguez teased an upcoming animal segment: “...we have some visitors to the studio of the animal variety. Some of them are cute and cuddly....But they’re all in trouble due to climate change and you’re going to see these animals from the San Diego Zoo and hear about their precarious situation ahead this morning.”

Rodriguez later introduced the segment by declaring that “climate change is affecting some of the world’s most beautiful animals.” She spoke with senior animal keeper at the San Diego Zoo, Rick Schwartz, who brought out the first guest, an arctic fox. Rodriguez asked him: “How is this animal in danger now?” Schwartz explained:

Well, the problem that we’re having up in the north, mainly with the polar bears. There’s not enough ice forming up there, so the time for them to hunt for their food is being diminished.... If the polar bears can’t hunt and bring food out in the winter time for the arctic fox, we’re going to see them probably –  either their numbers decreasing also or possibly moving south and interfering with other species that would rely on the foods that they would be using.

The hot air emitted from almost a century of White House Correspondents' Association Dinners has surely done its fair share to warm the Earth. So this year, Washington's journalistic community is going green. Cue the self-congratulatory pomposity.

Of course taking dramatic measures to reduce the carbon footprint of the nation's journalistic establishment is not without cost; "the most eco-friendly dinner ever hosted by the association" will cost $225 a head, up from $200 last year. Calls for attendees to offset carbon they emit on the way to the gala fit nicely with the Association's, er, shall we say affiliation with the liberal agenda.

Yes, it's all well and good that these folks want to help out the environment. But do they really need another reason to pat themselves on the backs while the President lavishes praise upon the Association and its members satisfy what the Weekly Standard describes as a "shameless and apparently indestructible need to give awards to one another, in a kind of daisy chain without end"?

President Barack Obama encouraged some business interests by mentioning nuclear energy and offshore drilling during his Jan. 27 State of the Union speech. Those less popular energy solutions joined the usual alternative rhetoric of wind, solar and bio-fuels.

But on CNBC's Jan. 28 "Street Signs," Jim Cramer, host of CNBC's "Mad Money" noted something was missing - an important onshore energy source, natural gas. And as for the nuclear energy signals - he wasn't convinced Obama was serious.

"I mean, I want to point out I thought the nuke thing was just the boilerplate nuke," Cramer said. "[Energy Secretary Steven] Chu is a research director, the Energy Secretary, really is more of a professor. Offshore oil and gas, the issue is onshore. Natural gas wasn't mentioned, got to be really careful about that."

Leonardo DiCaprio and a list of Hollywood's finest have just released a public service announcement encouraging people to petition Congress to pass the Clean Energy & American Power Act aka cap and trade.

The ad was paid for by the left-leaning NRDC Action Fund, a group whose board of directors includes Ari Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and John Podesta, Bill Clinton's former Chief of Staff.

The PSA encourages viewers to click on an embedded link which sends them to a petition saying the following (video embedded below the fold, h/t Story Balloon):

Yesterday, Media Research Center (MRC) President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell sat down in the MRC studio for a Skype interview with Breitbart.tv's "B-cast." [see video embed below the page break]

The topic: the latest MRC special report, "Omitting for Obama," which is a study of four stories --- Van Jones, Anita Dunn, ACORN, and ClimateGate -- "highlighted by the New Media in 2009 that were damaging to the Obama 'brand'" but were avoided like the plague by the old guard mainstream media.

 

CNN on Tuesday highlighted the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change use of a unsubstantiated claim about the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 to put pressure on politicians across the globe. Meteorologist Rob Marciano thought the “snafu” on the part of the IPCC was “inexcusable,” while anchor Rick Sanchez put the panel and its head on his “List You Don’t Want to Be On.”

Marciano brought up the week-old story during a segment 49 minutes into the 8 am Eastern hour. He played a sound bite from climatologist Jim White, who was attending the annual Steamboat Springs Weather Summit in Colorado (Marciano was on-location in Steamboat Springs). The CNN meteorologist voiced his agreement with White, who blasted the IPCC’s exaggeration:

At NewsBusters last night, Noel Sheppard posted about a UK Daily Mail report that "A scientist responsible for a key 2007 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warning Himalayan glaciers would be completely melted by 2035 has admitted that the claim was made to put political pressure on world leaders." Noel also noted that U.S. media coverage of this damning admission has been sparse.

The basis for the now-discredited claim was "a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF (World Wildlife Fund)." Further, the WWF report contained a basic math error causing it to assert that "one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres."

The Daily Mail reported that "Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’."

The statement must be humiliating, because if its text is anywhere on a WWF web site, it seems to be well-hidden, and perhaps deliberately so (see Update at the end of this post).

A scientist responsible for a key 2007 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warning Himalayan glaciers would be completely melted by 2035 has admitted that the claim was made to put political pressure on world leaders.

Such was revealed by the British Daily Mail Sunday in an article destined to further reduce the credibility of the world's so-called leading authority on manmade global warming.

As NewsBusters reported Saturday, the IPCC acknowledged earlier this week that its claim concerning these glaciers was based on junk science.

According to the Mail, those involved were quite aware of the faulty nature of this assertion, and did so for reasons consistent with what skeptics have been saying for years is at the very heart of the global warming myth (h/t Marc Morano):

Just days after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted it used junk science to predict Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035, its claim that global warming is linked to increased natural disasters has also been found to be wrongly concluded.

The British Times Online reported moments ago:

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The article continued:

Last Sunday, NewsBusters reported that the United Nations might be about to retract a claim its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made back in 2007 concerning Himalayan glaciers being completely gone by 2035 as a result of global warming.

On Wednesday, the IPCC issued a statement concerning the matter:

It has, however, recently come to our attention that a paragraph in the 938-page Working Group II contribution to the underlying assessment refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.

Despite the seriousness of this apology and its implications for the veracity of the entire manmade global warming myth, the announcement was completely ignored by America's major television news outlets EXCEPT Fox News (partial transcript of January 20's "Special Report" below the fold):

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Americans were treated to a number of populist sermons on the "special interests" who would oppose "reform" at any cost to maintain the "status quo" from which they "profit financially or politically." The drug companies, the energy companies, the Wall Street bankers, and the health insurers were the corporate enemies of a just and harmonious America, or so one might have gathered.

Obama was at the vanguard of this populist charge. But since his election, he has proposed health care legislation that would subsidize Pfizer and PhRMA, a cap and trade plan that would drive profits to General Electric, and Wall Street bailouts that lined the pockets of the same Goldman Sachs bankers he so reviled during the campaign. What happened?

Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney exposes and investigates this monumental disconnect in his new book "Obamanomics: How Barack Obama is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses." Carney explores the "political strategy of partnering with the biggest businesses in order to create new regulations, taxes, and subsidies." Those measures, he argues, actually benefit the biggest businesses by crowding out competition, consolidating market share, or giving billions in subsidies directly to those companies.

A 2007 warning from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers would be completely gone by 2035 due to global warming may be retracted in the coming days.

New revelations concerning this claim indicate that it actually came from a 1999 article in a scientific journal that was in no way verified by any members of the IPCC.

As Britain's Sunday Times reported Sunday, in the wake of ClimateGate e-mail messages showing IPCC scientists manipulating climate data, a retraction of this Himalayan glacier warning would further undermine claims by these people that the science is settled concerning man's role in global warming (h/t Ed Morrissey):

CNN’s Jack Cafferty highlighted the research of “some scientists [who] insist the earth is entering a cooling trend” in a commentary on CNN.com. Cafferty detailed the harsh winter weather in the northern hemisphere over the past weeks, and noted that the research “could undermine...what we’ve been told about the warming of the Earth being caused only by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.”

The editorial on CNN’s website would have been read by the commentator during his usual 6 pm Eastern hour “Cafferty File” segment on The Situation Room, but it was preempted by CNN’s wall-to-wall coverage of the earthquake in Haiti, specifically Wolf Blitzer’s interview of former President Bill Clinton on the disaster. After noting the unusually cold weather and describing its adverse effects internationally, Cafferty summarized the findings of the scientists, that “this winter is only the start of a worldwide trend toward cooler weather, which could last for 20 to 30 years.”

It hasn't been in the limelight recently, but it is coming. According to CNBC contributor John Kilduff of Round Earth Capital, we will soon see the price of reach $100 per barrel.

On CNBC's Jan. 11 "The Kudlow Report," host Larry Kudlow asked Kilduff what it would take for the Obama's administration to change its energy policy to allow for more oil exploration and drilling.

"Oil is hitting a 15-month high at $83 a barrel and it was $30 about a year ago," Kudlow said. "So, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar rules drilling of oil and gas out of bounds for federal lands. No drilling. So, how high does it go before we go back to drill, drill, drill?"

It must really be cold outside, for the CBS "Evening News" Monday actually did a segment exposing how members of Congress wasted a huge amount of money at the United Nations' climate summit in Copenhagen last month.

Even more surprising, CBS's Sharyl Attkisson pointed fingers at prominent Democrats including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Md.), and Charles Rangel (N.Y.).

Readers are encouraged to strap themselves in tightly, for this report coming from the global warming-obsessed media seems as likely as freezing temperatures in Miami (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

Less than a year ago, ABC global-warmist weatherman Sam Champion was warning people against moving to Florida because of the supposed danger of disastrous sea-level rises due to global warming.  Maybe Sam was on to something—but for the diametrically opposite reason . . . 

Check out the Weather Channel's forecast for the town of "Frostproof, Florida" for tonight: 22 degrees—a full 10 degrees below freezing.  Yikes!  Maybe Sam's right: a mistake to move to Florida because the climate is . . . just too darn cold.

The one good thing you can say about Andrew Freedman's "Cold weather in a hot climate" entry at the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog (HT James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web) is that he's at least not hiding his bias.

Boiling it down, Freedman believes that weather broadcasters should use the occasions of heat waves and serious storms as global warming teachable moments, yet become strict info relayers when it's extraordinarily cold. In doing so, he advocates a continuation of what Julie Seymour at the Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute has already observed:

The news media constantly misuse extreme weather examples to generate fear of global warming, but when record cold or record snow sets in journalists don’t mention the possibility of global cooling trends. While climatologists would say weather isn’t necessarily an indication of climate, it has been in the media, but only when the weather could be spun as part of global warming.

Freedman, whose post quotes Julie's work without linking to it, confirms that the bias she has observed is in his case quite conscious. In the process, he goes to a leading apologist for the "Hide the Decline" Climategate charlatans who have fraudulently been manipulating their so-called scientific research while "somehow" losing critical raw data, propagandizing and scrubbing supposedly objective reference sources like Wikipedia, and attempting to discredit, intimidate and marginalize skeptics for a decade or more:

First of all, let me wish you a happy and prosperous New Year, and I want to thank you all for reading this column and letting your thoughts be known by responding.

Whether your reaction to what I write be pro or con, it's always good to know what's on your mind, and I sincerely hope that you will continue to do so.

There is a great frustration abroad in America these days and goodness knows we have enough to be frustrated about; the economy, the two wars we are fighting, people walking unimpeded across our border from Mexico, a country that for all practical purposes is being controlled by a ruthless drug cartel.

The closing of businesses, the loss of jobs and the relentless cruelty of Islamic terrorists around the world all add up to a myriad of serious problems facing America today.

Although you will not hear it articulated in the mainstream media, I think what's bothering Americans more than any other single subject is the fact that we've lost control of our government.

As global warming alarmists get more desperate, they’re turning to allies in the mainstream media to help promote increasingly strident protests that the world really is warming.

Nobody is happier to oblige than ABC News. On Jan. 8, “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer and weatherman Sam Champion worried that the cold weather engulfing much of the world just may be the result of climate change.

Then there’s ABC’s Bill Blakemore. The title of his Jan. 8 ABC News.com article – which could only be a mislabeled op-ed – pretty much summed up his take: “No, the Cold Doesn’t Mean No Global Warming.”

“This is, of course, an old story,” wrote Blakemore, “ ... and more and more 5th graders are bringing it home from their science classes to get their parents up to date on the latest climate science.”

Two quick items from Thursday’s World News. ABC anchor Diane Sawyer heard “an echo of another young President in another time” in President Obama’s “the buck stops here” taking of responsibility for the failed Christmas Day terrorist plot as George Stephanopoulos explained her reference: “John Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs....The President took responsibility, his popularity shot up. The White House is calculating with the President taking personal responsibility, they can put this behind them.”

Minutes later, after a report on cold weather, Sawyer considered it evidence of “climate change.” She asked Sam Champion, a global warming devotee: “We've all been unnerved about talk about climate change. Is this one of those strange events that signals to you, even you, this is something brand new?” From Chicago, Champion, citing the “cold snap” in North America, Asia and Northern Europe, concurred “it certainly is a question that needs to be looked into.”

Just another example of painting any weather condition – too hot or too cold – as evidence of “climate change.”

Even popular liberals can come under fire from the media if they offer heretical views on global warming, which many in the media promote with near-religious fervor.

Rolling Stone magazine went after 17 global warming dissenters on Jan. 6, hyperbolically labeling them "The Climate Killers." Topping the list was Berkshire Hathaway CEO, Obama supporter and media darling Warren Buffett.

The magazine criticized Buffett for "doing far more than bad-mouthing climate legislation - he's literally banking on its failure" by adding 1.28 million shares of ExxonMobil to his books and acquiring a railroad that hauls coal.

Rolling Stone editor Eric Bates also told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Buffett "trashed climate change legislation calling it a huge tax saying it will cost jobs."

That's not even news, CBSNews.com reported in September that the Obama administration said cap and trade "would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year." But Obama didn't make the list of "Killers."