If it weren't so distortive of the political system, liberal media bias would be downright hilarious, particularly when it's manifested in journalists' ability to turn on a dime and engage in rhetoric that they previously condemn when used by others.
You can't help but smile after reading Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein's attempt to blame a few windstorms and hot weather on global warming (oops) climate change despite repeated proclamations during colder weather that "climate is not weather." None of that matters to Borenstein who procedes to write nearly 900 words of pure speculation as he warns us of the dangers of ManBearPig.
"Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho. These are the kinds of extremes climate scientists have predicted will come with climate change, although it's far too early to say that is the cause," says the AP. "Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June."
But after admitting that "scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study," the AP throws caution to the wind and serves up paragraph after paragraph of near-certitude from various climate scientists that the extreme weather we've been reading about is what they've been warning us about.
Describing Colorado as "fire-charred," even though wildfires have burned less than 200,00 acres out of more than 66.6 million acres (about one quarter of one percent), the AP paraphrases Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research having an "I told you so" moment and claiming these are the very record-breaking conditions he said would happen.
The AP also approvingly cites a recent special report on extreme weather events by "the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" that warned of "unprecedented extreme weather and climate events."
But the AP fails to remind readers that the credibility of the IPCC's work has been called into serious question by the been "Climategate" scandal in which thousands of leaked emails showed massive scientific fraud involving numerous "climate scientists" manipulating data and suppressing information which ran counter to global warming dogma.
Even using the IPCC's term, "unprecedented extreme weather," the AP should have known better than to pretend that last week's "derecho" storm was something out of the ordinary.
It isn't. A derecho is a somewhat common weather event.
In fact the phenomenon was identified and given a name way back in the '880. The 1880s.
And as for the recent heat wave, yes it's hot. But it pales in comparison to the most severe heat wave to hit North America in modern history, the 1936 NorthAmerican Heat Wave, which hit in the middle of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
Incidentally, the 1936 North American Heat Wave followed one of the coldest winters on record at the time -- a six-month weather swing far more extreme than what North America has seen over the last six months.
After many long paragraphs designed to convince you that today's summer heat, the common western wildfires and a line of strong summer thunderstorms blowing through the mid-Atlantic states is evidence that global warming is on the rampage, the AP does throw a bone to the notion of journalistic objectivity by quoting one -- ONE -- global warming skeptic:
While at least 15 climate scientists told The Associated Press that this long hot U.S. summer is consistent with what is to be expected in global warming, history is full of such extremes, said John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He's a global warming skeptic who says, "The guilty party in my view is Mother Nature."
But Borenstein can't even let that one skeptic's quote, buried almost at the end of the story, be the last word. No, instead he must labeled as out of the mainstream. Readers are helpfully informed that "the vast majority of mainstream climate scientists" "disagree" with Christy.
"This is what global warming is like," says Jerry Meehl, a "climate extreme expert" at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, "and will see more of this as we go into the future."
In late 2005, after the record-shattering 2005 hurricane season, the media was quick to link the many hurricanes to global warming, with similar prophesies of increasingly extreme weather in our overheated future.
What happened next? The next year was one of the quietest hurricane seasons in anyone's memory.
This this year's drought out West, which is contributing to the severity of the forest fires, is coming just a year after record snowfall. That's the thing about the weather -- it's always changing, and difficult to predict.
It is, however, much easier to predict is that the media will take almost any sudden change in the weather as more proof that global warming is real and about to kill us all--at least as long as it's something that can be blamed on global warming.
Who knew that weather is like the ObamaTax mandate? Weather is not climate, until it's convenient that it be so.
