Readers familiar with Time magazine’s global warming alarmism might have expected the publication to name climate change the culprit being worsening natural disasters. But they’d be wrong.
On September 3, Time.com examined “Why Disasters Are Getting Worse,” [1] and the answer was “not for the reasons you may think.”
Reporter Amanda Ripley acknowledged the expectation that Time would blame global warming: “It is tempting to look at the lineup of storms in the
“But there is another inconvenient truth out there: We are getting more vulnerable to weather mostly because of where we live, not just how we live,” Ripley said.
The problem, according to the article, is more about exploding populations in hurricane-prone areas and less about more intense storms. For example,
Ripley wrote that, “If climate change is having an effect on the intensities of storms, it’s not obvious in the historical weather data.” She cited Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the
Now that so many people (and all their stuff) reside on the coastlines, “each big hurricane costs more than the big one before it, even controlling for inflation.” Developing on the coasts has also destroyed natural protections against storms, Ripley said.
It was not long ago that Time magazine was promoting a link between hurricanes and global warming. The April 9, 2007, issue that presented readers with a 44-page “Global Warming Survival Guide” claimed that if a parade of disasters “didn’t quiet most of the remaining global-warming doubters, the hurricane-driven destruction of
In the past, Time ignored weather experts who deny that stronger hurricanes are caused by global warming. Instead the magazine promoted the IPCC’s take that it’s “more likely than not” [2] that man is responsible.
The magazine has a lengthy history of promoting climate change alarmism.
In April 2008, Managing Editor Richard Stengel defended the magazine’s “attention getting” decision to use the iconic image of Marines raising an American flag at
In that defense, Stengel ridiculed the notion of objective journalism saying, “[T]his notion that journalism is objective, or must be objective is something that has always bothered me – because the notion about objectivity is in some ways a fantasy [2]. I don’t that there is as such a thing as objectivity.
Even before Stengel argued on behalf of advocacy journalists, the magazine had declared the “case closed on global warming.” According to Bryan Walsh’s article in the Feb. 19, 2007 issue, “the price of inaction (on global warming) will be enormous.” Time also claimed in 2006 that “the serious debate (over global warming) has quietly ended.” [2]
The hundreds of skeptical scientists [3] who question man’s impact on climate change would disagree.