THE US REPORT

by Kay B. Day

On the heels of one of the greatest scandals in the history of science, my hometown newspaper ran stories on global warming, carbon dioxide levels and the end of the world in 2012. The stories ran in section A in Sunday’s big fat paper—fat because of all the Christmas advertising inserts. There was no mention of the scandal, however. [Story continues after photo.]

My copy of my hometown newspaper's Sunday feature on global warming, along with a feature on carbon dioxide emissions and a feature on the end of the world. No opinions opposing global warming alarmism could be found on the page.

The longest story  is an Associated Press piece, and it’s another in a perpetual line of advocacy pieces the AP has run on global warming (previously global cooling; subsequently climate change.] Within the story are quotes from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s climate adviser who probably sees lots of green for developing countries in those carbon emissions and quotes from the premier prophet of warming, former vice-president Al Gore. It’s pointless to excerpt from the story to prove my argument. For one thing, we could not locate the story anywhere online, even by doing a date-specific search of the Florida Times-Union website. I read the story in The TU.

Almost all wire stories about global warming can be summed up briefly:
The earth is warming. Fossil fuels must be restricted and the best case scenario would be to completely ban them. The US and other developing countries must pay through the teeth so undeveloped countries can upgrade the lifestyle of whoever is in power at the moment. Cap and Trade must pass. Otherwise we all die.

Nowhere in the stories run on Sunday was there mention of the hacked emails festering in the bowels of Hadley University’s Climate Research Center in the United Kingdom.

The US Report, by the way, fully agrees there is climate change on our fair planet. There always has been and always will be. If there were no climate change, I would encounter dinosaurs instead of alligators when I drive down San Jose Blvd. in my home city. If there were no climate change, Krakatoa’s eruption would not have killed more than 30,000 people in 1883. Mount St. Helens would not have strewn ash for more than 22,000 miles in the US in 1980. No climate change would mean no Andes Mountains, no gold meshed with ore in South Carolina and other Southern states, and no coastline along the Holy City of Charleston.

Furthermore, no climate change would likely also mean no human beings, if you think about it in an ancient historical context. Nor would we have the continent of North America as we know it.

The problem with the coalition of environmental fanatics today is that Cap and Trade legislation will do nothing to avert the asteroid Apophis from slamming Earth if the slightest odds prevail. It will do nothing to eliminate the need for primitive countries to cook their food over charcoal. It will do nothing to persuade people to change habits in the interest of the environment—even chief apostle Al Gore hasn’t done that. Otherwise he wouldn’t be a frequent flier and he most certainly would not have located his home in a natural area in the Southern mountains.

God help all the homeless rabbits and possums in Gore’s neighborhood.

If world leaders, most of whom we believe to be hopelessly corrupt and dedicated to their own personal economies, really believed in global warming, they would most certainly not be about to stomp a monster-sized carbon footprint in Copenhagen.

Teleconference, anyone?

What does all this have to do with newspapers?

Obviously today’s newspapers are not interested in any sort of journalistic objectivity when it comes to global warming/global cooling/climate change. There are any number of respected experts in different fields who disagree with the approach to global warming embraced by the UN, Al Gore, Democrats in Congress and Hadley. There are high profile experts that have proven alarmists' figures and data wrong.That newspapers refuse to even talk to these experts and that the Associated Press would run a long story by an obvious advocate who didn’t see fit to even give one dissenting voice even a single line of ink says it all.

If newspapers retained any mettle whatsoever, by now at least one would have disclosed the chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is chummy with the dastardly entity alleged liberals call Big Oil. Dr. R.K. Pachauri’s bio says: “In January 1999, Dr. R. K. Pachauri was appointed as Director, Board of Directors of the Indian Oil Corporation Limited (a Fortune 500 company) for a period of 3 years.”

That the Hadley scandal showing so-called experts allegedly lied, colluded and perhaps even simply made figures fit the outcome they desired is not even mentioned is rather like a reporter standing in front of a burning forest to do a story about ice skating. Yet there was not a single mention of dissenting experts on global warming in any of the AP stories on Sunday.

On Climategate, the scandal of the hacked emails, The Wall Street Journal said it best perhaps: Follow the money.

Newspapers are dying because if people want advocacy, they can turn to Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, Morning Joe, Larry King, Jon Stewart or PBS and get a far more entertaining type of advocacy than the Associated Press can provide. You’d think there’d be a publisher smart enough to figure that out.

Update on Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 1:24PM by Kay B. Day

Jonathan Foreman's Taking the private jet to Copenhagen is an excellent meditation on the hypocrisy of eco-evangelicals. It's a must-read, and here's a particularly mind-numbing passage; underscores are mine:

"At the end of the film An Inconvenient Truth, the unbearably earnest former presidential candidate Al Gore asked his audience: “Are you ready to change the way you live?” His own huge Nashville mansion consumed over 20 times the electricity of an average American home. Indeed, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, it burnt twice as much power in the month of August 2006 than most American homes do in an entire year. Another inconvenient truth revealed that the former senator spent $500 a month just to heat the indoor swimming pool in his lavish domestic establishment. The 100ft houseboat he bought in 2008, on the other hand, was said to be powered by biodiesel.

Gore gave the usual response of the green celebrity caught not practising what they preach. He said he made up for his consumption of electricity and production of carbon dioxide by buying carbon offsets — some from his own offset company."