The News from Wonderland

By Alan Caruba

Reading a newspaper these days is not unlike Alice’s visit to Wonderland where not much made any sense.

Take, for example, the December 16th, Sunday edition of the Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest circulation newspaper. The lead story on page one was an Associated Press report about an agreement reached in Bali that will provide a “new framework for tackling global warming, one that for the first time calls on both the industrialized world and rapidly developing nations to commit themselves to measurable verifiable steps.”

They might as well commit themselves to a global insane asylum because there is no global warming and reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) will have zero effect on the climate of the earth. The atmosphere consists of 0.038% carbon dioxide. By any measurement, that’s not much.

The reason for the United Nations Bali conference was that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol is going to expire soon and, to absolutely no one’s surprise, it was a total failure. None of the industrialized nations of Europe met their agreed upon carbon dioxide limits and two nations that cannot build power stations fast enough to meet their growing energy news, China and India, were exempt. The U.S. refused to participate. A unanimous Senate resolution cited “harm to the nation’s economy.”

I frequently wonder if the editors who put together a newspaper every day actually read it.

The Sunday edition had a story on page 19 whose headline read “Second Storm Barrels Across U.S.” This Associated Press story noted that “Snow fell from the Plains across the Midwest yesterday, accumulating as much as a foot in places, as the second wintry storm in a week barreled through on its way to New England.”

With no small irony, it noted that, “Tens of thousands of people still had no electricity since the first storm slammed Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri earlier in the week.” We are living in a nation where it is becoming increasingly difficult to build any power station fueled by coal (responsible for over 50% of all electricity in the nation). Kansas and Texas have both rejected these facilities in recent months. Meanwhile, Friends of the Earth continues to lobby and protest the building of any nuclear powered utilities. I am pretty sure those thousands of Americans who have lost power really miss it.

In the Star-Ledger’s “Perspective” section devoted to editorials, opinions and such, the lead story, taking up a width of three columns, is titled “CO2: Is the Answer to Air Quality in the Ocean?” I will not waste your time reading the blather about finding ways to increase the world’s ocean’s ability to absorb CO2 because that’s what the oceans already do and presumably have done ever since there was CO2.

You will not find any mention in today’s newspaper that there is absolutely, positively no evidence that the earth is warming. By “warming” I mean doing something unnatural by way of five or ten degrees. What has been occurring since around 1850, the year the last mini-ice age ended, is a perfectly natural warming to the tune of about one degree Fahrenheit.

There is something very wrong with newspapers that relentlessly print so-called “science” that doesn’t jibe with what is happening in the real world. Sooner or later their circulation, like that of The New York Times, begins to slide because folks figure out that they can get the truth elsewhere.

I like the Star-Ledger, but I find myself mostly checking the obituary pages. I am reasonably confident that when they say someone’s dead, they probably are.