Global Warming

New York Times reporter Justin Gillis is a man on a mission to save the planet from the depredations of global warming (rebranded as “climate change”). The activist environmental reporter was at it again in the paper’s Tuesday Science section, “Cooling Language About a Warming Earth" (too ideological even for the news pages?). Gillis, who regularly pushes the idea of a looming environmental…

A federal agency discredited a common argument of climate skeptics in 2015, but now a whistleblower has accused the agency of misleading the public and playing politics. Not that anyone watching the network news would know it. For several years, climate skeptics argued there had been a “pause” or hiatus in global warming beginning in 1998. Then, in June 2015, a paper from the National Oceanic…

California’s “exceptional drought” isn’t exceptionally bad any more. Winter storms have been good for the state, pulling it out of the worst rating from the U.S. Drought Monitor. However, this “huge improvement” barely registered with the broadcast networks that had blamed “climate change” for the crisis. CNN.com reported on Jan. 26, that “California’s drought is almost over.” For the first…

Should the mainstream media lead, to borrow a term from religion, a great awakening? Yes, in a sense, suggested longtime journalist Steven Waldman in a Thursday Washington Monthly piece. “Donald Trump and his campaign have pushed the idea that each of us has our own truth, or ‘alternative facts,’” wrote Waldman. “Suddenly I feel like journalists are the most religious people in America. I don’t…

One of the most frightening unknowns for the liberal media is how President Donald Trump plans to rein in the rampaging Environmental Protection Agency. The Trump administration recently banned the agency from using its social media accounts until further notice. This apparently spooked CBS Tuesday, because on Evening News they glorified the efforts of environmentalists who are trying desperately…

What do we do if we are increasingly willing to ignore “facts?” According to Jeff Rivers, “we’ll end up in real trouble.” Writing for ESPN’s The Undefeated blog, Rivers writes that when it comes to public policy “we too often allow ideology and political maneuvering to render facts moot, especially when those facts support inconvenient truths such as global climate change.” 

Critics gave former Vice President Al Gore grief for predicting in An Inconvenient Truth that major cities including lower Manhattan would be underwater if severe ice melt occurred. Now Gore is rewriting history to claim his prediction came true in order to promote his upcoming film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which debuted at Sundance on Jan. 19. In this case, context is the…

“The most important development of the last half-century in American politics,” believes New York magazine’s Chait, is “the Republican Party’s embrace of movement conservative ideology.” In a Thursday post, Chait cited six books, none of which was written by a conservative, that “help elucidate” this phenomenon. Among Chait’s choices: E.J. Dionne’s Why the Right Went Wrong; Richard Hofstadter’s…

Former Vice President Al Gore still has admirers among the media, if the latest issue of The Hollywood Reporter is any guide. Timed to the Sundance Film Festival opening night premiere of Gore’s Inconvenient Truth sequel, Gore sits regally perched on a stool on the cover of THR’s Jan. 27, issue. Tatiana Siegel’s cover story dripped with adulation for Gore’s “optimism” and environmentalism, and…

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency faced legislators on Capitol Hill as his confirmation hearings began Jan. 18. At the same time, celebrities spewed vitriol about him online. Comedian and television show host Jimmy Kimmel slammed Trump’s cabinet pick, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, in a tweet saying, “Put simply, Scott Pruitt is a piece of…

Next Tuesday, three days before the current POTUS becomes an ex-POTUS, Jonathan Chait’s Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail will be published. On Tuesday, New York magazine, where Chait is the chief political pundit, ran an excerpt from the book in which he claimed, “The truth is that Obama enacted careful, deep, and mostly popular solutions to a…

Meteorologist Eric Holthaus, who has appeared a couple of times on these pages in the past (more on that shortly), is in therapy. Well, okay, lots of people are. But get a load of what has driven Holthaus into therapy: "I know many ppl feel deep despair about climate, especially post-election." And it's because of this, "There are days where I literally can't work," and "We don't deserve this…

The image of America as “a shining city on a hill” (or a similar phrase) has been a staple of conservative political rhetoric for several decades. In a Tuesday piece for The New Republic, Matthew Pratt Guterl, a professor at Brown University, adapted the metaphor for leftist domestic use: “The nation as a whole seems no longer interested in celebrating any vision of equity, justice, and mutual…

After several months of New York Times angst over the supposed racist turn of the Republican Party, the front page of Monday’s New York Times featured a hostile report on a Koch brothers public relations campaign appealing to black voters, business reporter Hiroko Tabuchi’s “Koch Strategy Mixes Gospel And Oil Policy.” Beyond the “ultraconservative” labeling on the front page, Tabuchi found a left…