In Blizzard, Conservatives Mock Global Warming Alarmists, Left and Media Outraged
Back to back
Grandchildren of Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., built an igloo on the National Mall and christened it “Al Gore’s New Home.” Fox News anchor Glenn Beck employed his trademark sarcasm to make fun of the “disappearance” of warming priest Al Gore and devotee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. since the snowfall. Beck picked on Kennedy because of a 2008 op-ed lamenting that global warming had changed the D.C. climate leading to “anemic winters.”
Left-wingers online at place like Huffington Post and Daily Kos, as well as members of the national news media were furious that the “wingnuts” were using the blizzard to make fun of them. They rushed to defend their theory of man-made global warming (anthropogenic global warming or AGW) by claiming that the snowpocalypse was, in fact, caused by global warming.
“Science Guy” Bill Nye was so upset by it he attacked “unpatriotic” climate skeptics on Feb. 10 during the “Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC.
“To deny what scientists or scientific evidence is showing, is inappropriate. And as I said earlier, to me, when I get wound up, it's unpatriotic,” Nye declared. But there are more questions than ever regarding the science. Prof. Phil Jones, formerly of the Climate Research Unit, admitted this week to losing track of climate change data used to support warming theory and that there hasn’t been “statistically significant” global warming since 1995.
Some of the critics lied about what most conservatives were arguing, accusing the right of saying the historic snowfall disproved global warming. That wasn’t the case, conservatives were merely turning the tables on the left: using mockery to show the absurdity of assigning a cause and effect relationship from weather events to climate change.
The fact is that the weather is not climate. Before the “snomageddon” (as many in D.C. called it), AGW believers constantly connected every weather event from heat waves killing thousands in
ABC’s Bill Blakemore admitted that weather is not climate on Jan. 8 in a feeble attempt to prevent critics from saying that a “cold snap” across the northern hemisphere disproves global warming. Blakemore has a long history of advocating for global warming alarmism on ABC.
Of course weather isn’t climate, but the global warming alarmists like Blakemore want it both ways. They want weather and natural disasters to be proof of warming, but never proof contradicting it.
But it’s not just weather. The media and the left have even more ridiculous assertions about climate change. Like the Kevin Bacon game they seem willing to connect everything to AGW.
Actor Danny Glover blamed global warming for the Haitian earthquake in January 2010. Leaving no tragedy unturned, Joseph Romm, a former
In a blog post, Romm wrote: “Some may object to even asking the question, ‘Did climate change contribute to the Minneapolis
A media outlet called GMANews.TV based in the Philippines
Dr. John Brignell, a British engineering professor, has created a Web site linking to hundreds of media stories blaming AGW. In 2007, he had already posted more than 600 links with a number of unusual connections.
Contradictions like growth or shrinking of coral reefs, destruction or growth of bananas, and heavy or reduced snowfall were all on his list. A number of health ailments including allergies, asthma, cardiac arrest, cancer deaths in
Snowpocalypse Can’t Stop Faith in Warming
According to AGW believers in and out of the news media, weather can only ever support global warming theory. Not even back-to-back East Coast blizzards that dumped more than two feet of snow in the
The “snowpocalypse” that shut down the federal government, schools and many businesses for several days became one more “extreme” weather phenomenon in a long list attributed to global warming. It joined heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, tropical storms, cyclones, tornadoes, ice shelf and glacial melt, dying polar bears and even lack of snowfall.
MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan told viewers on Feb. 9, “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 and others have been upset by conservative mockery about global warming, given the record snowfall of the 2009-2010 winter. The MSNBC host criticized an ad by the Va. GOP designed to ridicule proposed climate change policies that could hurt the state’s job situation.
Talk about polar opposites. In 2010, Ratigan blamed blizzards on global warming. But just one year ago, NBC’s (MSNBC’s parent company) presidential historian Michael Beschloss claimed global warming could be responsible for the lack of Inauguration Day snow.
As the camera turned to President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and their two children walking to the reviewing box, Beschloss described the scene: “And this wooden path that they’re walking down actually dates to many previous inaugurations because a lot of them had snow. It may just be that because of global warming the last few have not.”
That was a frigid January day – 28 degrees at noon plus a severe wind chill – and the coldest inauguration since 1985. Still, according to the news media it was a sign of the destruction caused by fossil fuels, SUVs and other human activity.
But that’s just it. Logic doesn’t matter, according to alarmists the planet is warming, its mankind’s fault and so everything is a result of global warming.
Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Business & Media Institute that “global warming alarmism isn’t really a scientific theory as much as it’s a political program.” That becomes most obvious, Ebell said, when they “explain away the facts” such as more snowfall in the mid-Atlantic despite the IPCC prediction of less snow in the region due to global warming.
Even a tragic Air
Another horrible disaster, Hurricane Katrina was also linked to manmade climate change. On May 23, 2006, “Good Morning America” featured two previews: one of the hurricane season and one of Al Gore’s global warming movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Gore has been criticized by some for his “very heavy-handed” use of Katrina footage in the film.
Diane Sawyer linked the two saying, “And of course, there are a lot of people who believe that global warming is in fact to blame, in part, for this surge in hurricanes. One of them, former Vice President Al Gore, who has re-emerged, leading a kind of call to action.” She wasn’t alone, CBS’s Hannah Storm and NBC’s Robert Bazell all tied hurricanes to global warming that year.
But there are scientific problems with that assertion that even television meteorologists have criticized. And in May 2008, National Geographic reported that a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) study found global warming could actually decrease hurricane activity by about 18 percent.
Newsweek, a newsmagazine that had repeatedly attacked climate skeptics as “deniers,” has stated that there is “unequivocal” evidence of global warming and “90 percent certainty” that humans are responsible. In July 2007, the magazine called the 2003 European heat wave that killed thousands “a human fingerprint” of global warming. They didn’t consider any other factors such as the lack of air conditioning in much of
Citing a scorching
According to the media, everything is proof of warming, even if scientists – including CNN meteorologists – contradict them. Ebell offered one reason that for the media’s constant defense of AGW.
“I think part of it is that the media which from time to time portray itself as anti-establishment is actually an integral part of the establishment (the liberal establishment). So you can be a bomb-thrower if you’re going after Richard Nixon,” Ebell said. “but if they went after someone on their side” they would lose support. So whenever challenged on an issue like global warming, the media “circle the wagons and defend their own.”
Fires, Tropical Storms, Hurricanes and Tornadoes Named Despite Scientific Opposition
Seasonal weather events like tornadoes and wildfires have all been used to generate fear of global warming. NBC’s primary global warmer, Anne Thompson, warned in 2008 that “manmade carbon dioxide pollution, is making a bad situation worse.”
Thompson was referring to the rise in named tropical storms and active hurricanes that year. “This is the theory: carbon dioxide raises the ocean’s temperature, both at and below the water’s surface, providing more fuel for any storm,” Thompson said.
The same day, ABC’s Dan Harris connected hurricanes to global warming, citing the journal Nature. But other scientists, and even TV meteorologists, have disputed that relationship.
In 2005, NOAA concluded that the
“NOAA attributes this increased activity to natural occurring cycles in tropical climate patterns near the equator,” the study said.
According to the Heartland Institute’s article about the study, Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the
"We may be looking at stronger hurricanes by 5 percent," Landsea said. "And even that is a very small change that is still way off in the future."
In 2007, when wildfires ravaged
Foreman went so far as to predict a “century of fires, just like what we’re seeing now” as a result of global warming. Although he cautioned that that one fire couldn’t be specifically cited as evidence: "Climatologists say, while we can't blame one fire on climate change, we can say that these factors are combining in that area [Southern California] to set up what could be a century of fires just like what we're seeing now.”
Cooper and Foreman didn’t bother to mention the refutation of their theory by another climate scientist. A scientist from UC Merced told the Washington Spokesman-Review that California the real reason for the wildfires were “two staples of the region’s climatic history:” “strong Santa Ana winds” and “a drought that turned much of the hillsides to bone-dry kindling.”
"Neither can be attributed to climate change," said the UC Merced professor.
Warmer-in-chief Al Gore, whom the news media revere, labeled a
“It’s also important to note that the emerging consensus among the climate scientists is that even though any individual storm can’t be linked singularly to global warming – we’ve always had hurricanes,” Gore said. “Nevertheless, the trend toward more Category 5 storms – the larger ones and the trend toward stronger and more destructive storms appears to be linked to global warming and specifically to the impact of global warming on higher ocean temperatures in the top couple of hundred feet of the ocean, which drives convection energy and moisture into these storms and makes them more powerful.”
Scientists, including cable meteorologists, have disputed this claim by Gore. CNN’s Rob Marciano and Chad Myers have both denied it. Marciano said “global warming does not conclusively cause stronger hurricanes like we've seen” on Oct. 4, 2007 “American Morning.” Myers has disputed the link between warming and tornadoes.
Marciano was pleased that a
“You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant,” Myers said.
Right now, most of the news media are firmly entrenched in the global warming agenda, but that has not always been the case. For the past 100 years the media have peddled climate alarmism, but a Business & Media Institute study found that in roughly 30 year cycles the media switched from global cooling, to global warming, to cooling and back again to warning of catastrophic global warming.
