Weather

On Wednesday, Kyle Drennen at NewsBusters noted how NBC news anchor Brian Williams, chief environmental correspondent Anne Thompson, and old reliable global warming proponent Dr. Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research took advantage of this year's mild winter in the lower 48 U.S. states as an excuse to argue that "our warming world is shifting the odds against a traditional winter, winters as we have known them."

Well folks, winterize this report about Eastern Europe's deadly serious cold spell carried at a German web site (HT Expatica; bolds are mine):

On Tuesday's NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams fretted over winter doing a "disappearing act" and proclaimed: "It was so warm today across much of the country, as you know, they're calling it June-uary. It's got a lot of people wondering whatever happened to winter?" The headline on screen pondered: "Where's Winter?"

In the report that followed, chief environmental affairs correspondent Anne Thompson added to the alarmism as she declared: "This most unusual January ending on a remarkably mild note across the country....2,890 daily high temperature records broken or tied." She later cited climatologist and global warming proponent Dr. Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research: "Add to that a world warming because of climate change and it stacks the deck, Dr. Meehl says, against a traditional winter."

On Thursday's The Early Show, CBS hosted a guest who implicated climate change as one of the factors contributing to many weather disasters in 2011, and he ended up warning of more droughts in the future. After asserting that 2011 was an unusually active year for natural disasters, Dr. M. Sanjayan of the Nature Conservancy including climate change in the list of influences:

After the news portion of a "Warmer Weather Hurting Retail" segment on the impact of the mild winter on retail sales thus far appearing early this morning on CNBC, Joe Kernen and John Harwood got into it over the relevance and influence of so-called "global warming" (I guess Harwood didn't get the memo that it's "climate change" now).

Picking up at the 2:10 mark of the video:

After Politico hysterically named Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson its "Energy Policy Maker of the Year" Tuesday evening, NewsBusters sought the opinion of James Inhofe (R-Ok.), the ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

As readers would expect, this led to a lengthy discussion about the global warming myth, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, ClimateGate, and a host of related subjects guaranteed to inform and entertain skeptics across the fruited plain (audio follows with transcript):

Almost exactly two years since damning email messages were released from Great Britain's University of East Anglia showing a pattern of deception and collusion between scientists involved in spreading the global warming myth, a new batch of such correspondence has emerged that seems destined to get as little press coverage as the original ClimateGate scandal did in November 2009.

James Delingpole reported in Britain's Telegraph Tuesday:

For years NewsBusters has informed readers of the tremendous financial ties to spreading the anthropogenic global warming myth.

On Sunday, coincidentally  the second anniversary of 2010's ClimateGate scandal, Britain's Daily Mail exposed the BBC's Roger Harrabin for having taken £15,000 from the very university at the heart the damning email messages demonstrating a nefarious collusion between the world's top climate alarmists:

You knew some major news outlet was going to blame this weekend's east coast snowstorm on global warming.

On Tuesday, the folks on the NBC Nightly News did precisely that (video follows with transcript and commentary):

At the top of Wednesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer warned: "Record flooding in the wake of Irene leading to new evacuations and dramatic rescues across the Northeast....As FEMA's disaster fund runs dangerously low." Moments later he announced the agency was "running into a serious money crunch because of Irene and in-fighting in Washington."

In a later report, correspondent Tom Costello singled out those responsible for the "infighting": "You can blame politics and the new budget realities. The Republican-controlled House already voted to give FEMA another $1 billion this fiscal year, but that increase is tied to budget cuts elsewhere. So Senate Democrats haven't acted."

In the days leading up to Hurricane Irene's march through the Northeast,  journalists repeatedly suggested that the storm was yet more evidence of climate change.

"The scale of Hurricane Irene, which could cause more extensive damage along the Eastern Seaboard than any storm in decades, is reviving an old question: are hurricanes getting worse because of human-induced climate change?" asked the New York Times' Justin Gillis in his August 28 piece.

HLN guest host Don Lemon asked scientist Bill Nye on Wednesday if the storm was proof of climate change. Nye answered that it was "consistent with all the predictions of climate change models" and added that the United States is behind the times in taking action on climate change. "There's no other developed world country that isn't very concerned about climate change," Nye asserted, and ABC's weatherman Sam Champion agreed.

[Video below the break.]

On Monday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer introduced a panel discussion on whether media coverage of Hurricane Irene was overdone by proclaiming: "Was this storm over-hyped? In some ways, it's a one-sentence argument, this storm killed more than 20 people and 4 million people are without power, and clearly there's misery and destruction. How could it have been over-hyped?"

Weatherman Al Roker completely dismissed the notion: "You look at the predictions, you look at the track, which was right on the money. And it is a Category 3 storm. There is no – there's no argument here....The preparations –  everything that was done, I would say we should do over again if we get the same scenario." Weather Channel Meteorologist Jim Cantore chimed in: "How many more times do we have to play pictures [of flooding] in Vermont?"

If only George W. Bush had ordered home delivery of some pizzas during Katrina. On Meet the Press, David Gregory relayed how, before the tropical storm arrived on Saturday, Newark Mayor Cory Booker delivered a few pizzas to a shelter, then Gregory marveled at the “contrast...between President Bush regretting he had a flyover of the storm zone and here's Mayor Booker personally delivering pizzas.”

Gregory soon cued up far-left guest Michael Eric Dyson with “a larger point” of how “we're having a big debate over the budget in this town, the federal budget and deficit, and also the need for infrastructure improvements” and “the East coast is not prepared” for earthquakes nor “the kind of damage to our infrastructure that storms like this point up.” So, “what does it do to that debate?”

With Irene downgraded to a tropical storm, it is clear that this weather event has become another example of America's media hyping every potential crisis into a full-blown calamity before the fact.

Observing such was George Will on ABC's "This Week" Sunday who told his fellow panelists, "Whatever else you want to say about journalism, it shouldn’t subtract from the nation’s understanding and it certainly shouldn’t contribute to the manufacture of synthetic hysteria that is so much a part of modern life" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Nobel laureate Al Gore claimed on Friday that scientists involved in advancing the theory of global warming wouldn't do it just for the money.

Without recognizing the hypocrisy, he also told FearLess Cottage consumer advocate Alex Bogusky that scientists espousing a skeptical view of his money-making theory are exclusively doing so for their own financial benefit (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Update (17:48 EDT): Nagin was also interviewed on today's "Hardball," which was guest-hosted by Chris Jansing.

Teasing his Friday 3 p.m. ET hour show on MSNBC, anchor Martin Bashir proclaimed that he would have a special guest on to discuss incoming Hurricane Irene: "Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin joins us to explain what leaders must do to avoid the mistakes that were made six years ago." [Audio available here]

Bashir was "delighted" to have Nagin on the program and began by asking about the response of political leaders to the storm: "Is it your view, sir, that they are handling preparations for this hurricane in the best way possible?" Bashir followed up by wondering: "...with the benefit of your experience, what are the critical actions that you think need to be taken to ensure that Hurricane Irene, or any other act of mother nature, does not become Katrina, Part II?"

Thanks to Scott Whitlock for providing video after the jump

All last week, global warming-obsessed media were rife with reports about record-breaking heat.

Problem is, according to the National Climatic Data Center, and marvelously reported by the Hockey Schtick Sunday, almost no temperature records were actually broken:

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday mocked news outlets hyping the heat wave gripping much of the nation by reporting the heat index rather than the actual temperatures.

On Friday's "Real Time," host Bill Maher proved Limbaugh's point by falsely telling his audience, "It was 123 in Minnesota" (video follows with transcript and commentary, vulgarity alert):

Bill Maher on Friday once again got caught in his own hypocrisy.

As HBO's "Real Time" host waxed philosophic about socialism and "shared sacrifice" for the good of the country, Reason TV's Nick Gillespie stumped the sometimes comedian by asking if he would give up his cars or his television show to reduce his carbon footprint (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In April 2009, climate realist Christopher Monckton, a former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was invited to testify before Congress about global warming alongside Nobel laureate Al Gore.

The following video of a debate that happened in Australia Tuesday will perfectly demonstrate why Monckton, after he had arrived at Reagan International Airport in Washington, D.C., was informed that House Democrats refused his appearance at the hearing:

Nobel laureate Al Gore must be noticing the public's continued lack of concern for his money making myth about carbon dioxide destroying the planet.

On Tuesday, he announced a new campaign and worldwide event to re-energize global warming hysteria:

Over the past three years, the number of believers in anthropogenic global warming has been on a steady decline, while the number of believers in natural planetary warming and cooling cycle has been on a steady incline. The shrinking pool of people who still swear by Al Gore's Hollywood version of the climate trend is especially populated with journalists and politicians who refuse admit they were wrong and consider any science debunking manmade global warming.

As the numbers fail each year to match Gore's wild predictions, it is becoming increasingly difficult to form any logical support for Gore's gloom and doom global warming scenarios. To rectify the situation, the global warming community has quietly rebranded its cause as 'climate change,' which allows activists to push an environmental agenda without the threat of the earth's temperature not rising with it.

NewsBusters readers are quite familiar with the frantic hyperbole that often come from the keystrokes of Newsweek's so-called science editor Sharon Begley.

On Saturday she penned another breathless doozy with the Hitchcockian sub-headline "In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. Why we’re unprepared for the harrowing future":

America's media for a full week now have been shamefully hyping last Sunday's natural disaster in Joplin, Missouri.

Continuing with this trend Saturday was CNN's Fredricka Whitfield who on "CNN Newsroom" actually called this "the deadliest tornado on record" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters reported moments ago, ABC's "World News" on Monday did a segment attempting to tie this year's tornado season to global warming.

Quite comically, some of the fear-mongering tornado data in this report was contradicted by ABC News's own website Monday (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

ABC’s Diane Sawyer on Monday night presumed everyone lives inside her media bubble obsessed with “global warming” as she set out to blame the Joplin, Missouri tornadoes on it – but not even the CEO of a group dedicated to instilling public fear of “climate change” would go along with Sawyer’s fear-mongering. From Joplin, Sawyer plugged the upcoming segment:

When we come back, what do those experts say? Everyone's saying, is this it, is this global warming? Is this the evidence? Is it in? The answer.

Sawyer set up the subsequent World News story: “Is this it, this is the evidence of a kind of preview of life under global warming?” Reporter Jim Avila, who called the tornadoes “nature’s payback,” cited a thousand tornadoes and “counting so far, compared to 500 in an average year.” He turned to Heidi Cullen of Climate Central who, he relayed, says climate change “can be blamed for a general increase in extreme weather, science cannot specifically point to climate change for this hyper-deadly tornado season.”

Less than 24 hours after a devastating tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri – killing at least 116 people – an MSNBC anchor was busy putting a political spin on the tragedy.

Tamron Hall wondered aloud on "News Nation" today whether climate change was to blame for the rash of hurricanes and tornadoes that ravaged several states, including Missouri, over the last few months.

Like clockwork, an unusual weather event occurs and some shallow journalists immediately leap to speculating about global warming – even accusing humankind of causing the event. On Thursday night, looking at the tornadoes across the South, ABC’s Sam Champion ridiculously claimed “everybody is asking if climate change played a role here.” Brian Williams blamed humans: “What's going on here? Is this something we have done?”

On the NBC Nightly News, Williams prompted Greg Forbes of the Weather Channel:

Let's be candid here. When you and I go home, you see friends and family, you get e-mail from people you know. People ask the same question: What's going on here? Is this something we have done? What has happened to the climate because it seems so much of what we cover is relentless weather-related tragedy?

“For those of you who are confused [about global warming], you’re forgiven. It’s my fault.”

So hysterically said retired Minneapolis anchorman Don Shelby during a speech at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, Tuesday: