"Oh--it says 'snowjob!' I'm here by mistake."
Posted on 03/10/2008 6:28:09 AM PDT by Clive
Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism -- and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy -- can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.
The NIPCC is a counter to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The group was unveiled this week in Manhattan at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, along with its scientific report claiming that natural factors -- the sun, El Ninos and La Ninas, volcanoes, etc, -- not human sources are behind global warming.
The Washington Post's first instincts (not just on its opinion pages, but in its news coverage, too) were cleverly to sew doubt of the group's credibility by pointing out to readers that many of the participants had ties to conservative politicians, such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and that the conference sponsor -- the Heartland Institute -- received money from oil companies and health care corporations.
That's standard fare, and partly fair, so that's not what I am talking about.
The insidiousness I am referring to is the unfavourable way the Post compared the NIPCC report to the IPCC's famous report of last year.
After reminding readers that the IPCC and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work on climate change, the paper then, sneeringly, added: "While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists."
First of all, the IPCC and Mr. Gore won the Peace Prize, not a science prize, which only proves they are good at politics. They didn't win the Physics Prize, for instance.
Also, while the former vice-prez may have invented the Internet (by his own admission), he is demonstrably not a scientist. Yet in the same paragraph as the Washington Post lionizes Mr. Gore for his work saving the planet, it backhands non-scientists for meddling in the climate change debate, never once showing any hint it recognized its own hypocrisy.
And the paper displays its utter lack of intellectual curiosity, too.
Hundreds of scientists may have contributed bits and pieces of work to the IPCC's gargantuan report, but just 62 wrote the chapter said to "prove" that man is behind global warming -- not that many more than the 23 from the new NIPCC who the Post so snidely dismiss as inconsequential in number. And just 52 people -- many of them the kind of non-scientists the Post would have us believe have no business passing judgment -- wrote the IPCC's "Summary for Policy-makers." That's the publication that gets all the ink and drives the climate alarmism because it contains the most provocative statements about the certainty of manmade warming.
The bias is that whatever the IPCC and its defenders claim, the Washington Post and most other outlets report without scrutiny. Meanwhile, the motives and sources of all sceptics are instantly suspected and derided.
There's nothing wrong with scrutinizing the motives of people engaged in a dicey debate. The subjectivity arises from scrutinizing only one side and always with a preconceived notion of what you are going to find.
Such bias is typical, though, of the climate debate, and not just among reporters and editors.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a column that was provocatively titled, "Forget global warming:Welcome to the New Ice Age." In it, I explained that, far from being warming activists, some solar scientists see the recent downturn in solar activity as harbinger of a coming Ice Age.
I wondered how come we don't hear about that in equal measure with the claims of an impending meltdown?
I received over 1,800 e-mails, most of them complimentary. A large number, though, were as hysterical and vicious as any I have received on any subject in almost two decades in journalism.
How could I not believe? Was I being dishonest or just stupid? How much had EXXON paid me? Until I could write in favour of the warming theorists, I should "go back into your oil company-funded bubble. You @*!/x-ing hack."
And that was from a climate scientist at a major university.
At last week's Manhattan climate conference, delegate after delegate related stories about how they had been denied tenure, shut out of scientific conferences and rejected by academic journals because no matter how scrupulous their research, their conclusions disagreed with the prevailing orthodoxy of the Climate Change Pharisees. They spoke, too, of colleagues too afraid for their jobs even to turn up at the conference.
I don't believe we are headed for an ice age any more than we're hurtling towards a meltdown. But we are in the midst of overwhelming bias in favour of the meltdown side.
A music professor at UC: Berkeley says global warming is happening and is manmade! The time for debate is over, you respected climatologists!!!!
“The media snowjob on global warming”
Given the weather we had over the weekend, this is an exceedingly appropriate title.
Global warming is just another liberal grab for power. The leftist lemming will just fall in line and follow these money grabbers right over the Cliff. Really disgusting.
After seeing the snow storms in Ohio and else where... with records cold and snow.. I have heard some people are asking Al gore to get them some global warming..quick
AGW is not science, but approaches a cult of socialism, anti-captilaism, and the religion of Gaea, and the hatred of Western culture.
In short, exactly what they are teaching on campus now..
Hey, boss, the computer SAID it was OK...
There is a bright side to all of this: The AGW cult leaders have REALLY jumped the shark on this whole issue. When winters continue to get colder and colder due to the quiescent solar cycle — which will last years and years — the cold hard facts will debunk the hoax. That’s the kind of shock that it takes to shatter a leftist world view, and the natural reaction will be to swing the other way. (Hence the saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.) In other words, when reality becomes irrefutable, the cultists will feel betrayed and swing to the hard right as a result.
The problem is that this process won’t be fast. Might start really seeing it in 2012, more likely 2016. The question is how much damage will the AGW cult do to freedom and the economies of the West before then?
"Oh--it says 'snowjob!' I'm here by mistake."
To convince the world that there is a serious threat of Global Warming after the winter we just had, is like being able to talk a dog off a meat wagon.
I’m impressed.
>> Shouldn’t that be sow? <<
No, they’re making this up out of whole cloth.
Bttt.
You expect a newspaper columnist to have command of the language that they’re writing in? Where have you been?
I wonder if they made a pair of pants or perhaps a nice warm coat out of the "doubt". Sow is not always a female pig.
I do.
Nailed it!
The one thing that I think would really fracture the MMGW crowd is the publication of the names of the major scientific MMGW advocates in the world.
In essence, saying that “The credibility of these people is at stake.”
Most importantly, it should be noted if they have tried, in any way, to shut down skeptics of their beliefs. This will separate those who are just poor or mistaken scientists, from those who were trying to gain power and wealth from spreading hysteria.
It would accomplish nothing to include the political hacks, scoundrels, and non-scientific speculators in that list, as they neither have nor care about credibility, only their money and power.
But it would be fair warning to those who put their credibility on the line, and who menaced their fellow scientists, that BOTH their credibility is gone in the future, they are in disgrace in the scientific community; and also that their disgrace is irredeemable, because they misused their credentials to attack other scientists.
For the rest of their lives, they must be branded “bad scientists”, and even in their obituaries, it should be said that they ruined their careers *not* by embracing a failed scientific theory, but by persecuting other scientists in its name.
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