The Media Destruction Machine at Work

By Alan Caruba

It was entirely predictable and, as such, a perfect example of the way the mainstream media, wedded to the bad science and false pronouncements of the global warming crowd would attack the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change.

The Conference, held in New York March 2-4, and sponsored by the Heartland Institute, attracted some 500 people from around the world to listen to climatologists, meteorologists, economists, policy makers, and others with impeccable credentials. They were brought together by their disdain for the global warming hoax, based largely on the false claims of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These in turn are spread by people like Al Gore along with scores of environmental organizations.

The global warming hoax has been maintained by virtually all elements of the mainstream media (MSM). An event like the conference therefore, from their point of view had to be discredited.

Perhaps the most committed to the hoax is The New York Times. Since the early 1980s it has published some of the most astonishingly idiotic articles about global warming including the claim that the North Pole was melting.

The latest in a line of Times reporters on the subject is Andrew C. Revkin. He began his March 4 article, “Cool View of Science at Meeting on Warming”, by writing that, “Several hundred people sat in a fifth-floor ballroom at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square on Monday eating pasta and trying hard to prove that they had unraveled the established science showing that humans are warming the world in potentially disruptive ways.”

This is not journalism. This is opinion. It belongs on the opinion pages, not in the news section. Moreover, the suggestion that the speakers and attendees were “trying hard” suggests that it took anything more than a review of actual climate data to dispute the claim that the Earth has warmed dramatically and is likely to warm more. Even Meteorology 101 students know that the Earth has warmed barely one degree Fahrenheit since the end of the last mini-ice age in 1850. This is a quite natural warming and hardly attributable to human factors.

Thereafter Revkin larded his report with the kind of qualifiers intended to discredit anyone named. The famed climatologist, Patrick J. Michaels, was identified as having “a paid position at the antiregulatory Cato Institute…” Presumably, everyone attending the conference had a paid position of some sort or they could have ill-afforded to be there.

The conference sponsor, the Heartland Institute, was identified as “a Chicago group whose antiregulatory philosophy has long been embraced by, and financially supported by, various industries and conservative donors.”

Apparently, having a dim view of the economy-killing matrix of regulations is a bad thing. This kind of funding identification is never applied to Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the countless other environmental groups, some of whom have been the beneficiaries of numerous corporations. The March 3 issue of Business Week reported that, “ten of the largest U.S. corporations and four environmental groups joined forces last January to lobby for federal regulations to restrict greenhouse-gas emissions.”

These restrictions would be the result of legislation before Congress to impose a cap-and-trade scheme that would, in effect, permit emissions to continue under the umbrella of buying and selling “credits” to do so. This will enrich many industries with these bogus credits to sell.

Revkin made sure that readers lined up on the side of the IPCC reports, noting that, “The latest reports, published last year and embraced by all major nations and scientific academies, concluded that the most warming since 1950 has been caused by humans and that centuries of rising temperatures and seas and ecological disruption lay ahead if emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide were not curbed.” This is hogwash!

The IPCC reports have been protested by many of the people at the conference, some of whom are IPCC contributors whose data has been repeatedly ignored. The reports have had to be continually revised and are an object of scorn in the scientific community for their deliberate deceptions and distortions of fact. Revkin will never tell you that.

With some 500 people available to interview, Revkin ended his article by quoting “a campaigner from Greenpeace (who) sought out reporters.” I, on the other hand, had no problem talking with real scientists during the event.

Not to be left out of the effort to mock the conference, Juliet Eilperin wrote an article for the Washington Post in which she identified the Heartland Institute as a “free-market think tank funded by energy and health-care corporations as well as conservative foundations and individuals” as if this was some kind of bad thing. She described the event saying, “The meeting represented a sort of global warming doppelganger conference, where everything was reversed.”

Well, yes! This was the first international conference to confront the deluge of lies about global warming. Rather than interview an actual climatologist, Eilperin chose to quote Frank O’Donnell “who heads the watchdog group, Clean Air Watch,” who said that the conference looked to him “like the climate equivalent of Custer’s last stand. They seem to have tried to find every last skeptic on Earth and put them in one hotel off Broadway.”

Contrast this with the fawning MSM coverage of last year’s United Nation’s Bali conference to breath life into Kyoto Protocols that require nations to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Never mind that carbon dioxide constitutes a mere 0.038 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere and follows climate changes as opposed to the claim that it precedes change.

CNN ‘s coverage was even worse if that is possible. Miles O’Brien, its chief environmental correspondence, equated all of the distinguished scientists attending and participating as comparable to people who continued to believe the earth was flat after Christopher Columbus’s voyage. Suffice it to say he mocked leading skeptics that included Patrick J. Michaels, Lord Christopher Monckton, Fred Singer, Dennis Avery, and others whose writings in scientific journals have yet to have been disproved.

The founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman, told the audience at the conference that the channel has become nothing more than an outlet for global warming alarmism. He openly called global warming a fraud.

Lord Monckton took an optimistic view that events such as the conference will eventually contribute to the truth replacing that “scare” of global warming. The odds are that Lord Monckton is right.

Increasingly, one can sense that the public around the world has grown weary of the idiotic claims of an unprecedented increase in heat resulting from human activities. The average hurricane makes human activity look quite puny. A volcanic eruption makes us all tremble. An earthquake makes buildings and bridges fall down.

A theory about warming to which the expansion of glaciers and major blizzards are attributed is so suspect that anyone can see through it.

For my part, I found that both the experts and others in attendance were a cheerful lot. The mood was upbeat and optimistic. What remains now is to defeat some truly horrid legislation making its way through Congress that would wreck the nation’s economy even more than the present calamities.