When is comes to the liberal news media virtually any unusual weather event gets connected to climate change or global warming: heat wave [1] or hurricane, drought or blizzard [2].
So it was no surprise when the media quickly connected the recent
wildfires, heat wave and a Derecho that hit Washington, D.C. causing a
widespread power outage to climate change.
Associated
Press, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and
The Washington Post have all run stories about climate change since the
start of summer on June 20. Those reports were rife with alarmist slant.
CBS
“Evening News” delivered a one sided story citing climate change
worriers, but no skeptics on July 3. NBC “Nightly News” cited global
warming as a possible cause of the Colorado fires [3].
But MSNBC took the cake by citing a skewed poll, consulting a
spokesperson for the environmental movement, and taking shots at Mitt
Romney, Newt Gingrich and the Koch brothers. MSNBC’s “Ed Show” also
consulted warming alarmist Bill Nye “The Science Guy” who claimed “big
hurricanes are consistent with models of climate change … The
dehydration of the forest in Colorado and the forest fires are
consistent with models of climate change.” [4]
MSNBC’s Alex Wagner went all out to hype climate danger on the July 3 edition of “Now with Alex Wagner.” [5]
She began by misrepresenting a comment on twitter from former GOP
presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. The tweet read: “Friend and
coauthor bill forstchen notes washington-baltimore blackout mild taste
of what an emp (electromagnetic pulse) attack would do.”
Wagner
used this to argue that people are ignorant about climate change
saying, “Is this just further evidence that Washington is completely in
the dark on the severity of global warming.” She also quipped that “Newt
may have been actually the victim of an electromagnetic pulse.”
She
was, in fact, totally wrong. Gingrich was referring to Forstchen, whose
novel “One Second After,” described how an American town might cope
with the loss of electricity and all modern conveniences. It had nothing
whatsoever to do with climate.
Wagner
also interviewed British adventurer and climate change alarmist David
Mayer de Rothschild on her show to discuss his views on the weather and
general sentiment about climate change. Rothschild, an heir to the
Rothschild banking fortune, was active in a left-wing campaign to target
Chevron as part of the bogus claims that the firm was involved in
environmental destruction in Ecuador.
Wagner
welcomed him warmly saying, “although every time I see you I feel like
some horrible environmental catastrophe has befallen us, and we once
again return to the question of why our political class, our rulers, the
ruling elite, are not more focused on environmental concerns. You would
think that this, happening in Washington D.C., would spur some sort of
action, or at least thinking on the subject.”
Rothschild called on Wagner and her viewers to try to make the economy a “subset of nature.”
She
also criticized the efforts by politicians who were skeptical of global
warming, whom she accused of being set up by the Koch brothers. “It
doesn’t help that the Koch brothers, who are big players in oil and gas,
are going to spend $400 million on this election trying to make sure
that their guys are elected.” The Koch brothers are billionaire
entrepreneurs who donate to many conservative organizations and causes
and who are hated by the left.
Even with all that Wagner went a step further, claiming that a Washington Post-Stanford University poll [6]
said that said that 78% of Americans think that global warming is a
serious problem. However, what the poll actually showed was that 78% of
those who think that global warming is happening also think that it is a
serious problem. A subtle, but key difference.
CBS
“Evening News” national correspondent Chip Reid used a fig leaf of
objectivity July 3, when he said no weather incident is climate change,
but then relied on a lefty “expert” who said exactly the opposite. Reid reported [7]
that “No one can say whether climate change caused last Friday’s
ferocious storm that left more than 4 million people without power, but
[climate change advocate Kevin] Trenberth says it probably made it
worse.”
Reid
also played the “consensus” card, acknowledging there are people
skeptical of the danger of climate change but promoting the alarmist
view saying: “a large majority of climate scientists say that climate
change is real and … if they’re right that means the extreme weather is
only going to get worse.”
Trenberth,
according to the CBS report, is with the federally funded National
Center for Atmospheric Research, and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize
with a group of climate activists who included Al Gore. Reid included no
one from the other side of the issue.
Trenberth
was one of the warmist scientists whose emails were leaked as part of
the Climategate controversy. An email from Trenberth to Michael Mann,
James Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer said, “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” [1] He and others have claimed their remarks were taken out of context.
One
Washington Post columnist sounded more like lefty websites from
Climate Progress to Common Dreams that were blaming global warming for
the recent weather. Petula Dvorak wrote on July 6 [8]
that the American public is finally starting to notice what the
“global-warming Paul Reveres have been shouting about.” To support her
argument, she quoted a reader who said that the last ten years in
Washington, D.C. “left an impression” that the region is approaching the
“inner circle [of Dante’s inferno’] quickly.” Dvorak failed to note
that the inner circle of Dante’s Hell is full of ice.
Like
the media, left-wing websites rushed to connect this summer's wildfires
and heat wave to climate change and some called for action. On The
Huffington Post, one "climate change expert" from the liberal World
Wildlife Fund called politicians to quit "napping on the fireline: wake up, smell the smoke and act on climate change." [9]
Climate Progress, the climate focused blog of Think Progress was
thrilled to find Washington, D.C. NBC meteorologist Doug Kammerer
talking about the heat wave and declaring: "If we did not have global warming, we wouldn't see this." [10]
Think Progress is an arm of the left-wing Center for American Progress
which has gotten $7.3 million from liberal billionaire George Soros'
Open Society Foundation.
Common Dreams warned “This is just the beginning,” quoting a Weather Underground meteorologist.
Other
left-wing websites attacked the media, claiming there wasn’t enough
climate change alarmism in reports. That was the argument Democracy Now!
made in discussion of the recent weather events.
Democracy Now!, a left-wing website that is part of the Soros-funded Media Consortium [11], complained that news coverage of the heat, wildfires and recent tropical storm rarely contained "two other words: global warming." [12]
In that discussion, Suzanne Goldenberg, U.S. environmental
correspondent for The Guardian (U.K.), revealed her bias on the issue
saying: “Absolutely, climate change is a big factor here [in Colorado
fires]. We've had a 10-year-or-more drought across the West. You haven't
had rain. And when you have had rain, it hasn't come at the right time
or in the right quantity. Crucially, you haven't had snow. You've had
really mild winters. It's that dry. And that's an effect of climate
change."
But
of course what was actually missing from news coverage were
non-alarmist scientists like Dr. Roy Spencer, who wrote on his own website
that June 2012 temperatures were actually “Not that remarkable.” He
wrote, “Even if it was the worst in the last century for the Eastern
U.S. (before which we can’t really say anything), there is no way to
know if it was mostly human-caused or natural, anyway.”
Then
he responded to potential critics saying, “‘But, Roy, the heat wave is
consistent with climate model predictions!’ Yeah, well, it’s also
consistent with natural weather variability. So, take your pick.”
As for the heat waves, Professor Judy Curry, said on her website, “We saw these kinds of heat waves in the 1930′s, and those were definitely not caused by greenhouse gases. [13]Weather
variability changes on multidecadal time scales, associated with the
large ocean oscillations. I don’t think that what we are seeing this
summer is outside the range of natural variability for the past century.
In terms of heat waves, particularly in cities, urbanization can also
contribute to the warming (the so-called urban heat island effect).” She
told this (and more) to AP’s Seth Borenstein, but she says he chose not to
include her responses in his story.
Stanley
Goldenberg, a National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
meteorologist, said in 2009 that “The [climate] debate, as you also
know, is masked by media censorship, bias and distortion.”
He
added that, “I’ve seen gross, gross blatant censorship” by the news
media. His experience is consistent with the findings of the Business
and Media Institute on media coverage of climate issues. In 2008, BMI
released a Special Report called Global Warming Censored that found the
media agreed with Al Gore’s claimed that the “debate’s over.” Global
warming proponents overwhelmingly outnumbered those with other opinions
by nearly a 13-to-1 radio [14].
