World Energy Monthly Review: June 2008	Download a PDF file of this article

We Report, We Decide

by Richard R. Loomis and Susan Salter

The Fox News network's famous slogan is "We report, you decide." Sounds like the essence of objective journalism - if only it were true.

Fox, like every major television network and most newspapers and magazines, has a lot at stake. To gain ratings or circulation (thereby boosting advertising revenue), outlets must do whatever it takes to grab our attention. And these days, nothing grabs attention like footage of, for instance, an Arctic glacier breaking up, or a somber talking-head predicting the end of the rainforests. Global warming sells, and thanks to the mainstream media, the American public is buying it up by the ton.

As much as we would like to credit Al Gore and his minions with the global warming craze, let us quote another unimpeachable source - Time magazine - on the subject: "[Those] who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right. … Weathermen have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer." That observation was published in 1939, and it helped herald a media fascination with predicting doom and gloom as Mother Nature throws us her best curveballs.

A mere 36 years later, Time (along with Newsweek and probably your local newspaper) was singing a different tune. The sky was falling again, only this time it was a global ice age that would threaten Life as We Know It. Indeed, the years 1974 and 1975 were a veritable golden age of media-pushed climate change. "Telltale signs are everywhere," wrote Time in 1974, "from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of warmth-loving creatures like the armadillo from the Midwest." Newsweek also mentioned "ominous signs" that Earth's weather patterns "have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth."

Anyone who was in school in the 1970s may remember learning of the impending ice age. The presentations were simple: a few handouts, a chart predicting cooling trends, pictures of people in warm coats, snow in Los Angeles, that kind of thing. The three channels of the nightly news occasionally ran a story associated with global cooling, but the bulk of the stories were carried by print news sources.

Today, we are connected 24/7 to news sources on TV and online, and we have come full circle back to global warming. And we are much more excited by the news. Could it be because the media is so much better at disseminating unbiased, in-depth coverage of a highly scientific issue? Well, if you believe that …

Drowning in Information

Unfortunately, the U.S. media and content providers have taken a very hard line when it comes to sharing global warming information across the media band waves. Instead of reporting on the issue and building well-rounded stories, media outlets are generating a new brand of yellow journalism. Anyone who even questions the approach the media has taken to the coverage of global warming is subject to censorship and ridicule.

"After more than a century of alternating between global cooling and warming, one would think that this media history would serve a cautionary tale for today's voices in the media and scientific community who are promoting yet another round of eco-doom," stated Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), whose remarks were published in 2007 in the reference book series At Issue.

The former chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Inhofe has kept a close watch on how the media reports climate change. He cited an edition of CBS's 60 Minutes (Feb. 19, 2006) on the melting North Pole. "The segment was a completely one-sided report, alleging rapid and unprecedented melting at the polar cap," wrote Inhofe. "It even featured correspondent Scott Pelley claiming that the ice in Greenland was melting so fast that he barely got off an iceberg before it collapsed into the water." What 60 Minutes failed to inform its viewers, Inhofe explained, was that "a 2005 study by a scientist named Ola Johannessen and his colleagues [showed] that the interior of Greenland is gaining ice and mass and that according to scientists, the Arctic was warmer in the 1930's than today."

Of course, the media is quick to point out that as 1) a Republican, and 2) a representative of oil-rich Oklahoma, Inhofe is destined to take global-warming advocates to task. In 2007 Newsweek's Sharon Begley wrote about the senator: "The denial machine has a new friend in a powerful place."

This tactic of so discrediting any global-warming skeptic has been highly effective in removing any opinion counter to the idea that global warming is nothing short of a catastrophe, that it is man-made and that the planet will become uninhabitable unless we take drastic measures today. As a result, the global-warming storyline has become embedded in our public consciousness to a level that parallels religion.

Recently this one-sided view was documented in Global Warming Censored: How the Major Networks Silence the Debate on Climate Change, a report released by the Business & Media Institute. The study analyzes how U.S. news media resources are covering the story of climate change, and two of its more interesting findings are:

• Squashed disagreement: Global warming proponents overwhelmingly outnumbered those with dissenting opinions in news broadcasts. On average, for every skeptic there were nearly 13 proponents featured. ABC did a slightly better job with a 7-to-1 ratio, while CBS's ratio was abysmal at nearly 38-to-1.
• Questionable resource quality: Scientists made up only 15 percent of the global warming proponents shown. The remaining 85 percent included politicians, celebrities, other journalists and even ordinary men and women. There were more unidentified interview subjects than actual scientists used to support climate-change hype (101 unidentified to just 71 scientists).

"On the three networks, 80 percent of stories (167 out of 205) didn't mention skepticism or anyone at all who dissented from global warming alarmism," reported Global Warming Censored. Notice the wording: The point of this statement is that the stories never mentioned that anyone disagreed with the premise that global warming was real or a problem. All of the stories portray the phenomenon as absolute fact. (As CBS reporter Pelley once remarked, questioning the need to find or even mention a dissenting opinion about the issue, "If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?")

Even when they are caught in the web of scientific evidence, climate-change proponents have a talent for skewing the numbers in their direction. When earlier this year new footage emerged of a crumbling Wilkins Shelf (a 5,000-square-mile ice formation in the Antarctic), Salon.com's Andrew Leonard noted that "RealClimate, a blog perhaps best described as the most rigorous clearinghouse for scientific commentary supporting the thesis of anthropogenic climate change, [acknowledged] that Antarctica was cooling, but claimed that such a phenomenon was exactly what most models of climate change had long predicted! The explanation is that the greater volume of water in the oceans surrounding the South Pole absorbs more of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases than do the land masses of the north."

For his part, Leonard said that his "personal leaning is to trust RealClimate." But, he added, "I'm prepared to acknowledge that there is a built-in bias among the commentators there to interpret data in a way favorable to the models of climate change that have received the imprimatur of the International Panel on Climate Change. And I'm a little surprised at how the mainstream news coverage of the Wilkins collapse doesn't mention that, outside of the Antarctic peninsula, temperatures are not rising at the South Pole."

And So It Goes

In an April cover story for Time, Bryan Walsh followed the prescribed pattern, offering analysis and suggested measures (including cap and trade) for global warming - with nary a hint that some people doubt the science. Walsh's article, in fact, ties the climate issue to the very heart of the democracy. "For a country that rightly cites patriotism as one of its core values," he says, "we're taking a pass on what might be the most patriotic struggle of all. It's hard to imagine a bigger fight than one for the survival of the country's coasts and farms, the health of its people and the stability of its economy - and for those of the world at large as well."

If Time was a biased observer, its bias was mild compared to the example cited by Lorne Gunter of the National Post, who wrote at scathing length about a Washington Post article published this past March on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). The NIPCC, explained Gunter, "is a counter to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," or IPCC. The IPCC, of course, is the media's go-to source for global warming information.

Unveiled in Manhattan at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, the NIPCC presented a report maintaining that natural forces (El Niños, the sun, volcanoes) - and not human sources - are behind global warming. "The Washington Post's first instincts," said Gunter, "were cleverly to sow doubt on the group's credibility by pointing out to readers that many of the participants had ties to conservative politicians … and that the conference sponsor - the Heartland Institute - received money from oil companies and health care corporations."

That attitude, he added, "is standard fare." But what really got to Gunter was "the unfavorable way the Post compared the NIPCC report to the IPCC's famous report of last year." The Post first reminded readers that Gore and company had recently won a Nobel Prize, then ("sneeringly," said Gunter) added, "While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years, … the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists."

Well, Gunter pointed out, Gore's Nobel Prize is for peace, not any scientific category; "and while the former vice-prez may have invented the Internet (by his own admission), he is demonstratably not a scientist." While the Washington Post, Gunter concluded, "lionizes Mr. Gore for his work saving the planet, it backhands [Gore's fellow] non-scientists for meddling in the climate change debate, never once showing any hint it recognizes its own hypocrisy."

Not everyone at the Post is blind to hypocrisy, however. Columnist Robert J. Samuelson has been writing for that paper for 30 years. In 1997 Samuelson said that global warming "may or may not be the great environmental crisis of the next century, but - regardless of whether it is or isn't - we won't do much about it." In 2006 Samuelson revisited that column and found himself with the same conclusion, though from a different perspective. "Al Gore calls global warming an ‘inconvenient truth,'" he said in his follow-up column. "That's an illusion. The real truth is that we don't know enough to relieve global warming, and - barring major technological breakthroughs - we can't do much about it."

Also in March, Fred Singer of the Science & Environmental Policy Project told CNN's Miles O'Brien: "A warmer climate is better than a colder climate. Something people tend to overlook." O'Brien described his guest as "a superstar among the climate change skeptics here. The gist of his argument? Sure, the climate is changing and the ice is melting, but it's not our fault. And so we shouldn't do anything about it." Singer replied that his belief was based on "a matter of evidence. I go by data." Whose data? Why, the IPCC's - the organization most cited by global-warming activists.

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a well-known "debunking" organization, took on the subject of the connection between hurricanes and global warming in 2006. Writers Matthew C. Nisbet and Chris Mooney summed up the flack as "a true headache even for the most seasoned science reporter." "Journalism isn't used to these kinds of problems," as they quoted science reporter Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, who continued: "The great strength of the global warming argument lies in the balance of the evidence. The closer you bore into specific impacts like hurricanes, however, the more equivocal the science gets."

While they cited "several noteworthy articles accurately detailing the complexity of the science," Nisbet and Mooney said that the general tone of much of the coverage of the hurricane-global connection had reporters - "sometimes in the context of the same stellar writing - building their stories around emotional conflict between scientists, a tendency that drives the researchers themselves to become quite angry at the media."

Conveniently Massaging the Message

It doesn't stop there. It is widely acknowledged that within Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, there are nine exaggerations, untruths or lies sold to the public as truth. In addition, it has come to light that the beautiful footage of the ice breaking into the sea is in fact taken from the movie The Day after Tomorrow - amazingly lifelike special effects, but nothing more than movie magic. This can be compared to the fabricated documents from the story that ended Dan Rather's career at CBS News. The anchor's story about George W. Bush's military service was supported with documents that turned out to be forgeries. At the heart of the matter was Rather's response: He explained that while the documents may not have been real, the story was still true.

It's not as though the dissenters aren't out there. Within the scientific community, one does not have to go far to find scientists who will downplay the dangers we are facing and question their causes. The trick is to get their voices heard. Here are a few of the voices that deserve a wider audience.

• "I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never ‘proof') and the coincidence that change in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time," said John Christy, a former member of the IPCC. He continued, "We [dissenting scientists] discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we've seen the climate do has happened before. Sea levels rise and fall continually. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk before. One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America."
• Dr. Pat Michaels, a research professor and Cato Institute senior fellow, has written and lectured repeatedly in the last 15 years that human beings are responsible for most of the warming in the past century. At the same time, he is quick to point out that this warming should not be treated as a catastrophe and that the environmental hysteria is wrong. At a speech given in Wichita Falls, Texas, at the annual event of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, he told all of the "oil men" that if they wanted to deny the influence of man on climate change they would just "have to get over it." He quickly followed that with evidence that suggested this warming was beneficial to the planet.
• The U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee released a list on Dec. 20, 2007, of more than 400 skeptical scientists from different fields, including astrophysics, geology, climatology and meteorology. The release did not even earn a news brief from any of the three networks as of Dec. 31.

Rush to Judgment

Even Internet resources are being shaped to tell only one story clearly. Wikipedia is well known not as a professionally vetted resource but as a forum where anyone can add information. Wikipedia's global warming entry contains pages and pages of information to support the theory. However, any attempt to add a hint of "con" to their "pro" will quickly be removed. (How do we know? It happened to us.)

The U.S. media has considerable power and influence, and its global reach goes much farther than it ever could in the past. We are seeing a concerted effort to move a whole population toward one conclusion. Even those who disagree are being brought right along in this battle. Yellow journalism - the practice of journalists creating the news - is alive and well in America. Many within the media field will argue that they are trying to save the planet, that they are going to make sure that the public "acts" on this issue to save humanity's children. Their desired actions are being put into place to reduce carbon at a great economic and social cost to the planet.

But what if these actions and this agenda are wrong? What if the unintended consequences of these journalists' promoted actions remove the United States as an economic, political and social leader? What if their actions keep millions in the Third World from ever rising out of poverty? What if this rush to judgment causes governments to come to battle over the very resources the global-warming believers are trying to prevent us from using? Are the arbitrary options presented by the media - in this case, "reduce carbon or kill the planet" - putting us in the position of relying on the no-brainer answer, no matter what the consequences?

An open forum for debate, where all sides of the issue are heard, could increase awareness and foster new possibilities for change. It is such a simple request, yet one so seemingly impossible to fulfill.