NY Times Environmental Desk Goes the Way of Global Warming

By Alan Caruba

“What’s in worse shape””, asked the Heartland Institute’s Director of Communications, Jim Lakely, in a January 11^th blog post. “The state of the Earth’s climate? Or the state of the New York Times? Global temperatures are not rising all that quickly, so the Earth is doing fine. Meanwhile, the Old Gray Lady is shutting down its Environmental Desk.”

The Heartland Institute has cause to celebrate because it has led the effort to debunk the global warming hoax, sponsoring international conferences that brought together the world’s leading scientists and others to demonstrate how specious the alleged “science” of global warming was and is. It did so in the face of a United Nations agenda to advance the hoax and a compliant and cooperative media that did nothing to dispute it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have been an unpaid policy advisor to The Heartland Institute for many years, only once receiving a small grant many years ago to help fund research involving the global warming hoax. These days donations to my blog help sustain the effort.

As the planet enters its seventeenth year in which temperatures have been steadily falling in response to a natural cooling cycle, the result of reduced solar radiation, the global warming hoax is finally being revealed as an instrument of the United Nations and individual governments, including our own, to impose “carbon taxes” that would raise billions of dollars for everyone involved.

The New York Times with its vaunted reputation has been suffering the same fate as many daily newspapers in the U.S., as well as news magazines such as Newsweek and Time. The rise of the Internet has bled off advertising revenue, but I maintain that as alternative sources of information became available, the Times and the mainstream media has suffered a loss of credibility across the spectrum of news topics.

In the case of the Times, however, their journalistic sins were much worse than others because it led the global warming hoax from its beginning, never failing to fill its pages about rising sea levels (they’re not rising precipitously), declining polar bear populations (they’ve increased), and using every weather event from hurricanes to tornadoes to droughts (all cyclical and natural) to shout about a “global warming” caused by carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gas emissions” that had nothing whatever to do with a non-existent threat to the nation and the planet.

Bluntly stated, the Times lied about global warming—now called “climate change”—on a daily basis.

The Times Environmental Desk had a team of editors and reporters that never lost an opportunity to further the greatest hoax of the modern era and one can only hope that reporters like Andrew Revkin will be reassigned to cover high school football and soccer games in the tri-state area. On his Facebook page, Revkin said he was never a fan of the desk even though he worked for it and lamented the elimination of an environmental editor. It is doubtful, however, that the Times will eliminate its editors and teams that cover the White House, Congress, and other activities of interest to readers, including sports.

Maybe it was just serendipitous—the Times has been cutting back on staff for quite some time now—but I believe the news that the poster boy of global warming, Al Gore, had sold his television channel, Current, to al Jazeera, a notably anti-American channel that gained fame broadcasting Osama bin Laden’s rants, was the “final straw” that led to the decision to shut down its Environmental Desk.

In a January 11^th Wall Street Journal commentary, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., wrote that “Mr. Gore and his allies wore out their welcome with their exaggerations, their self-righteousness, and their perfectly foolish insistence that a plurality of voters could be morally bullied into giving up their self-interest if chastised long and loudly enough by Mr. Gore.” His commentary took to task the lies of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that extrapolated from 1.58% of the Earth surface—the lower 48 U.S. states—to suggest a global warming phenomenon.

The public did not rush to purchase electric cars, nor did they install expensive solar panels on the roofs of their homes. Instead they worried about the price of gasoline and the rising cost of electricity and other expenses whose costs have been increased by extraordinary bad “environmental” laws and regulations such as the requirement that ethanol be added to each gallon, increasing is cost while decreasing mileage, and destroying the engines under the hoods of millions of automobiles. As forty percent of the nation’s corn crop was siphoned off to make ethanol the cost of most food items at the supermarket increased as well.

The good news is that there will not be an environmental editor or deputy environmental editor at the Times, nor seven reporters whose sole job was to report lies intended to advance and bolster the agenda of the Environmental Protection Agency, NOAA, and the agendas of heavily funded environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and the World Wildlife Federation.

The “newspaper of record” has debased itself and the profession of journalism for too long as a leading participant in the progressive movement’s effort to impose socialism on the greatest example of the power of capitalism and the free market—the United States—the world has ever known.

© Alan Caruba, 2013