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.”
Voices from the Fray
“Climate change is not an on-off switch. It is a continuing process. The
sooner we stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, the
sooner we can reduce our impact on the climate and minimize the risk of
reaching tipping points that make preventing further warming even harder.”
– Fred Pearce, NewScientist.com, May 16, 2007
“[In 2008] there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we
will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their
ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly
identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate
policy response (throw Jonah overboard).”
– John Tierney, New York Times, Jan. 1, 2008
“Our mission, of course, is to find evidence of climate change.”
– Reporter Ann Curry of NBC’s Today, Oct. 29, 2007
“Those of us who are scientists (I’m a physicist) do not like our terminology
usurped by those who have never passed a college science course in their
lives. And we do not like the vicious attacks on colleagues who are just
doing their jobs.”
– Gordon J. Fulks, Ph.D. in physics, in AccuWeather.com’s Brett Anderson
blog, March 7, 2007 |
Inhofe Speaks Out
James Inhofe (R-Okla.) is a longtime critic of the portrayal of climate
change as a result of human activity. In 2006 he presented the lecture
“Hot and Cold Media Spin Cycle: A Challenge to Journalists Who Cover
Global Warming.” From his speech:
The media have missed the big pieces of the puzzle when it comes to the
Earth’s temperatures and mankind’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. It is
very simplistic to feign horror and say the one degree Fahrenheit temperature
increase during the 20th century means we are all doomed.
First of all, the one degree Fahrenheit rise coincided with the greatest
advancement of living standards, life expectancy, food production and human
health in the history of our planet. So it is hard to argue that the global
warming we experienced in the 20th century was somehow negative or part
of a catastrophic trend.
Second, what the climate alarmists and their advocates in the media have
continued to ignore is the fact that the Little Ice Age, which resulted
in harsh winters which froze New York Harbor and caused untold deaths,
ended about 1850. So trying to prove man-made global warming by comparing
the well-known fact that today’s temperatures are warmer than during the
Little Ice Age is akin to comparing summer to winter to show a catastrophic
temperature trend.
One final point on the science of climate change: I am approached by many
in the media and others who ask, “What if you are wrong to doubt the dire
global warming predictions? Will you be able to live with yourself for
opposing the Kyoto Protocol?” My answer is blunt. The history of the modern
environmental movement is chock full of predictions of doom that never
came true. We have all heard the dire predictions about the threat of overpopulation,
resource scarcity, mass starvation, and the projected death of our oceans.
None of these predictions came true, yet it never stopped the doomsayers
from continuing to predict a dire environmental future. |
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.
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