Posted by Christopher C. Horner Apr 19th 2010 at 4:59 pm in Environment, Featured Story, Mainstream Media In my book Red Hot Lies, I dedicated chapter one to the media’s gullibility, and worse, in enabling the global warming industry. Media service to weather or climatic panics goes back more than a century. One particularly amusing anecdote is the Los Angeles Times, which was among many outlets seizing on the fear of frozen stuff on the heels of the Titanic’s sinking at the hands of an iceberg, digging up an academic to say that the expanding ice would soon consume us all.
OK, so that’s just yellow journalism. And of course there’s the absurd slop-slash-ignorance in slavishly toeing the alarmist line. For example, in 2008 NBC showed B-roll footage of penguins to add the texture of charismatic fauna to a story claiming that Arctic ice melt of 2007 was destroying the Arctic (whose “past the point of no return” ice mass has, ahem, returned).
The real news story was how the hell those birds might have gotten to the other side of the planet from where they live. Two months later, NBC showed polar bears in a story about a supposedly melting (but according to observations, actually ice-mass gaining) Antarctic. Again, school kids would spot these errors.
And in recent days the media have been repeating a new favorite story line grounded in the notion of global warming causing tectonic and other major geophysical activity in the northern hemisphere in places where tectonic and major geophysical activities have never been uncommon (on my visit to Iceland I was told of tens of minor earthquakes, from the constant shifting beneath them, per day). Consider this note from Red Hot Lies:
When someone claims that global warming is causing more earthquakes in Greenland, the media love the (absurd) story line, and even though actual experts on glacial quakes exist, they are not cited in the widespread coverage of this supposedly ominous claim.(Instead, the best the experts could do was an LTE in a rival paper to that pushing the hype).
I’m just curious but, looking at the Reykjavik temperature record, does anyone see any warming in Iceland in the past 70 years? If it’s the warming that followed the strong three-decade cooling that they imply caused the activity, then please, please also discuss, for context, what surely is a record of similar results when temperatures were like this after the prior warming to current levels, say in 1941?
This would all be simply pathetic were it mere yellow journalism and slop. But it has moved beyond that, with today’s activist media now in the service of advancing an agenda with serious security, economic and of course human consequences. Where this is all heading, soon, and what it means to you is the subject of my third book, published today and which is all you’ll need to be fully armed to stop this disaster, “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America.”
Mark Levin, Stephen Moore, Michele Bachmann and others have some nice things to say on the jacket; inside, it strips bare the cap-and-trade scheme, other Obama anti-energy and anti-liberty policies, exposes his radicals, and of course defrocks the ‘green jobs’ scam. And tonight Sean Hannity will roll it out on his television show on Fox News Channel.
Big Jounalism
