When one thinks about what is at stake, one would think the media would be very careful about the facts when reporting on global warming.  One would think if important new findings arose to contradict previously relied upon information concerning global warming, the media would report this as big news.  One would be wrong.

VENUS - EARTH’S HOT TWIN

What if the Earth became like Venus, totally overheated and unlivable because we burned living rainforests instead of fossils while going solar? (Photo: NASA)

The price we’re paying for this one-sided, biased reporting on global warming is not trivial. 

We are all grateful for environmentalist accomplishments, and there is still much work to be done, but even before global warming alarm became front page news, in many areas the environmentalist lobby had already become extreme. 

For example, we now have ”smart growth principles,” a well-meaning but grossly overreaching ideology disguised as enlighted public policy and accepted by too many media and politicians as fact.

Thanks to ”smart growth,” in spite of being relatively underpopulated, in California it has long been virtually impossible for anyone to build affordable low density housing or lay new freeways. 

Now global warming alarm is the nudge that is taking an already overreaching environmentalism even further, with new curtailments to our economic freedoms being proposed and adopted by our politicians, and the mainstream media is behind it all the way. 

In an increasing number of counties in California, for example, we are now turning over 2% of every home sale transaction to environmental nonprofits - something politicians have been agreeing to thanks to the momentum environmental lobbyists have acquired from global warming hysteria.  Shouldn’t such a huge new mandated transfer of wealth from home buyers into the hands of ideologically driven nonprofit corporations who hire attorneys to block development in exchange for financial concessions make news?  How many readers knew of this? 

Here’s another one:  California is now requiring builders to include an analysis of the ”global warming impact” in their environmental impact reports.  Neither of these practices existed a year ago. 

And much of the basis for global warming alarm is distorted, selectively presented statistics, if not absolute fabrication.  Here’s something we dug up recently, reported by Michelle Malkin in her report “Hot News, NASA Quietly Fixes Temperature Data“ and posted last August: 

“Steve McIntyre, who operates the site climateaudit.org, while inspecting historical temperature graphs from NASA, noticed a strange discontinuity, or “jump” in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000.  The graphs were provided by NASA’s Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McIntyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it.  The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.  McIntyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an “oversight” that would be fixed in the next data refresh.  NASA has now silently released corrected figures…”

What Malkin went on to report, along with a handful of other websites, but totally ignored by the mainstream press virtually everywhere on earth, is that 1998 was not the “warmest year on record,” it was 1934.  We now know that five of the ten warmest years on record were before WWII - according to newly corrected and rereleased figures from NASA.

This is huge.  It was probably hotter in the 1930s than it is today.  Everywhere you go you hear the same refrain - “hottest years on record.”  And this assertion is not backed up by facts - according to NASA.  If you really want to dig into this, read a follow up written by McIntyre on August 20th “Hansen & the Destruction of Creation.”  It is a frightening expose of how biased and ideological many members of the scientific community have become.  Meanwhile massive rainforest destruction for biofuel crops is causing droughts and extreme weather, to earn carbon offset funded subsidies.

But what about the recent record icecap melt, or the accelerated melting observed last month in Greenland, you may ask?  That’s certainly been in the news.  Well we just completed an interview with Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr., one of the most eminent atmospheric scientists in the world, and an expert on climate change, and we asked him about this.  Here is what he said:

“These are examples of selecting observations to promote the view that the human input of carbon dioxide is dominating climate change.  The actual observations across the globe present a much more complex picture than represented by these two examples.  Antarctic sea ice reached a record maximum in 2007, and the globally averaged lower atmosphere has not warmed in the last 9 years.  There are regions in the world where glaciers are advancing, such as New Zealand, parts of the Himalayas and in Norway.  However, this information has been almost completely ignored by policymakers and the media.”

Perhaps many people simply want to believe in fossil fueled global warming because it dovetails nicely with their other biases.  Maybe they don’t like Republicans, but that won’t last, because Republicans are outdoing Democrats when it comes to knee-jerk global warming inspired expansions of government power.  Or maybe they don’t like oil companies and automakers.  And some of them go further - such as many of the public school teachers who we trust with our children’s educations - and profess that corporations and profit incentives are to blame for the ills in society, and they want government to take over huge sectors of our economy. 

None of this has anything to do with whether or not we should ban CO2.  And when scientists replace their scientific skepticism with ideologically driven advocacy, as is happening far too much these days with respect to global warming, the ingrained skepticism of the media must rescue us.  That the media would ignore NASA’s fundamental revision of the temperature records that form one of the main pillars of global warming concerns is unconscionable, to put it mildly.

Ed Ring posted this entry on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 11:16 pm and is filed under Global Warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.