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.”
Now, fast forward to August 19, 2000, the New York Times was so eager to promote fears of the Arctic melting that it cheapened itself with a comical article declaring “The North Pole is Melting.” The Times reporter, John Noble Wilford, noted that tourists visiting the North Pole saw open water and declared that "The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water, was more than 50 million years ago." Wow. Pretty convincing stuff -- that is until the Times was forced to retract the story 10 days later and admit nothing unusual had occurred at the pole. No wonder today’s Times editorial felt compelled to accuse me of “a hysteria of doubt,” it was no doubt a clumsy attempt to distract from their climate reporting legacy of hysteria.”
Mainstream Media Reaches Tipping Point
The American people are fed up with media for promoting the idea that former Vice President Al Gore represents the scientific “consensus” that SUV’s and the modern American way of life have somehow created a “climate emergency” that only United Nations bureaucrats and wealthy Hollywood liberals can solve. It is the publicity and grant seeking global warming alarmists and their advocates in the media who have finally realized that the only “emergency” confronting them is their rapidly crumbling credibility, audience and bottom line. The global warming alarmists know their science is speculative at best and their desperation grows each day as it becomes more and more obvious that many of the nations that ratified the woeful Kyoto Protocol are failing to comply.
Quite simply, Kyoto is dead and panic has gripped the global warming alarmists as they realize that Kyoto was nothing more than a fantasy. The Wharton Econometrics Forecasting Associates estimated Kyoto would cost an American family of four $2,700 annually, yet only reduce temperature by .06 Celsius. Even the “Kyoto Lite” proposal of McCain-Lieberman would have cost American households an additional $810 a year and more than one million jobs would have been lost. Under McCain-Lieberman, electricity prices would have increased 20% and the difference in temperature would have been a mere .029 Celsius. These proposals would affect all Americans, including ranchers, farmers, those in the retail industry and virtually all sectors of the economy. Even the most ardent global warming alarmists now realize that Kyoto and similar proposals are all economic pain for no climate gain.
Evidence of this media collapse can be found in the over 500 e-mails my office received within a few days of my September 25, 2006 Senate floor speech taking the media and climate alarmists to task. Well over 90% of the e-mails and phone calls were positive responses from the grass roots of America and from many scientists who had finally had it with skewed reporting of traditional media outlets like the New York Times. And, it was not just the American people who responded. My speech and its message of mainstream media hype and failure, spread across the globe -- from New Zealand, to England, to Canada to the Bahamas and China. It seems Americans are not alone when it comes to frustration with the relentless and unfounded scientific predictions of climate doom.
Shattering the Scientific Consensus
In April 2006, 60 prominent scientists wrote a letter sent to the Canadian Prime Minister asserting that the science is crumbling from underneath global warming alarmists.
‘Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future…Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary,’ the 60 scientists wrote.
‘It was only 30 years ago that many of today's global-warming alarmists were telling us that the world was in the midst of a global-cooling catastrophe. But the science continued to evolve, and still does, even though so many choose to ignore it when it does not fit with predetermined political agendas,’ the 60 scientists concluded.
