Forget pretty much any news reporting you see that attributes
disastrous phenomena to global warming, because it’s all designed
to create a fog surrounding the core issue: is climate change
human-caused or not?
A most recent example is from Monday’s Washington Post,
in which alarmist reporter Kari Lydersen (who has a
long record of such journalism, in addition to work she does
for leftist publications such as In These Times
and the Progressive, on
topics including “environmental
racism”)
told about how waterborne diseases are expected to multiply
due to future climate devastation:
“Now, scientists say, it is a near-certainty that global warming
will drive significant increases in waterborne diseases around
the world.
“Rainfalls will be heavier, triggering sewage overflows,
contaminating drinking water and endangering beachgoers. Higher
lake and ocean temperatures will cause bacteria, parasites and
algal blooms to flourish. Warmer weather and heavier rains also
will mean more mosquitoes, which can carry the West Nile virus,
malaria and dengue fever. Fresh produce and shellfish are more
likely to become contaminated.”
The inevitable devastating consequences, as in
so many environmentalist reporter articles, dominate the
opening paragraphs of Lydersen’s piece. She follows by asserting
that a trend of heavier rainfalls “will accelerate,” citing the
2007 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. I asked Lydersen where in the IPCC report it states
with certainty that heavier rainfalls would rapidly increase, and
she promised to get back to me on that — “That was paraphrasing,
not a direct quote from the report,” she told me in an email. I’m
sure.
Regardless, this kind of distractive reporting buttresses the
lucrative industry that is global warming alarmism. “It’s going
to cause sea levels to rise!” cry the coastal scientists and
fisheries experts. “It will massively displace wildlife!” scream
the biological scientists. “It will prolong droughts and
intensify rainfalls,” warn the geologists and agricultural
scientists. Their wailing fills up their applications for
billions of dollars in grants from governments and sympathetic
nonprofit foundations.
But these outcries miss the point, because they do not address
the core issue of whether the temperature uptick (of one degree
Celsius) over the last century is attributable chiefly to man’s
influence and thus mitigable, or to natural fluctuations and that
nothing can be done about it. In other words, the vast majority
of research (80 percent? 90 percent? more?) tied to climate
change has nothing to do with its cause.
Therefore we have a whole derivative economic sector constructed
on the foundation of a single premise: that increasing greenhouse
gas emissions are having a greater impact on global climate than
are other phenomena such as solar activity, cloud cover, ocean
temperatures, El Niño/La Niña, etc. If that single thesis is
deemed false, then all these offshoot opportunities for
researchers, government, universities, nonprofits, rent seekers,
and media goes into a deep chill. Goodbye
grants. Adios agency positions.
Ciao,
charitable contributions. So long,
subsidies. And where hast thou gone, writing awards?
Just think — if it’s shown beyond the mainstream media’s reach
that carbon dioxide and its gaseous sisters (methane and a few
others) do not jack up the atmospheric temps, we would
no longer have to live under the environoia of this collaborative
claptrap.
So obviously it’s in each of the alarmists’ interests to dismiss
their dissenters and undermine any evidence that global warming
is not a threat to the planet or to mankind. Jim Martin,
executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health
and Environment, has said,
“You could have a convention of all the scientists who dispute
climate change in a relatively small phone booth.” There was the
classic Newsweek
smear job by Sharon Begley last August which labeled some
differing-but-credible climate scientists as a fossil fuel
industry-funded “denial machine.” Meanwhile the green-journalism
Society
of Environmental Journalists marginalizes
the opposers as “skeptics and contrarians.” Discourteous folks
call ‘em “flat-earthers.”
But the difficulty of the alarmists’ protectionist task only
grows. There has been
no significant warming since
1995, and none at all since 1997. The
numbers of detracting scientists were already sizable and are only
continuing to
grow (PDF). The oceans are
cooling, Antarctic ice
grows, current temperature measuring data are biased in favor of heat,
and legitimate explanations for Arctic ice loss (by the way,
not
an unprecedented phenomenon) other than increased greenhouse
gases are
published.
When you think about it, the global warming industry is not
dissimilar to the current mortgage-instigated mess the country
now faces. We have a planetary heat crisis and an insufficient
home ownership crisis. Government demands intervention to remedy
both mistaken theories. Media joins in celebrating and promoting
the new agenda. A bubbling system of artificial wealth is
created. But because both foundations are shaky, they cannot hold
up the continued weight placed upon them.
One has finally collapsed. When will the other?
