The New York Times has just published another in a series of establishment press missives seeking to marginalize — from the perspective of establishment press-types — tea party activists and politicians who embrace or are embraced by them.

This latest entry is an embarrassment, if a rather typical one as I detail on Chapter 1 of Red Hot Lies, “Media on a Mission.” Here are some problems with the article:

“Climate change is real, and man is causing it,” [Dem. Congressman and pro-cap-and-trade voter Baron] Hill said, echoing most climate scientists.

The author does not point to any survey of “most climate scientists,” challenge or even inquire about the source for or other evidence to support that claim. That is because there is no such survey or collective assertion by the critical masses of “climate scientists.” Period. It’s a talking point. But he’s a reporter. If he wanted to be straight about the issue he would at the very least turn to the very inconvenient statement by the Association of State Climatologists. But, again, it’s inconvenient.

When pressed, those who scribble or utter this shibboleth generally expand the universe of “climate scientist” to include anyone who is willing to go on record agreeing in return for being called one of the world’s leading climate scientists. Even if they are anthropology teaching assistants. Read on.

That is, they revert to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collection of (as its name indicates) representatives appointed by governments, which itself appoints anthropology TAs, instructors in “the human dimension of environmental change” (bring own incense, please) and transport policy instructors, for example, to achieve great if still exaggerated (why is that necessary?) numbers of supporters who supposedly (but didn’t) write its proclamations? The IPCC’s “chief climate scientist” and chief “climatologist,” according to outlets like the New York Times and USA Today is, just for the record, actually a… railway engineer.

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If you’re ever looking for an exhibit to illustrate the establishment media’s inability to view issues other than through their desired prism, look no further than last Wednesday’s Washington Post editorial page. The lead edit was a shrill tantrum about Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli amending his Civil Investigative Demand for University of Virginia records involving applications and payments for taxpayer-funded grant money, in accordance with a recent judge’s ruling (which Cuccinelli is in the meantime appealing; having read the briefs and observed argument, I think this is easily the right call).

The editorial complaints are rather strange. These are that a) Cuccinelli is using old arguments in re-filing his request for documents — though such consistency of legal theory, tailored to reflect the judge’s ruling, would make sense in this context and surely WaPo would also flip out if the AG changed his arguments; and b) that Cuccinelli is actually looking into possible fraud against the taxpayer in this action under the Virginia anti-fraud statute, and not trying to put climate science on trial! See prior reply as to WaPo’s reaction if the opposite were true.

It is unfair of me to apply standards of rational thought to the clearly emotional WaPo, but this is really taking its bias to absurd depths. And beneath the edit — I speak literally, as it would be very difficult to actually go lower than the editorial — is a cartoon portraying Cuccinelli is the judge screaming at Galileo that he wants his emails. (more…)

This is how low “profiles in courage” in Massachusetts’s U.S. Senate representation has fallen, and how bad the media-leftist complex has gotten. Today’s Washington Post carries an homage by columnist E.J. Dionne to Sen. John Kerry’s “passion” to push an “energy bill.”

The absurd, offending sentence is “Which brings us back to Kerry, who in a talk with me made no apologies for his eagerness to get an energy bill.” Well. Yes. He’s eager to tell you how his cap-and-trade global warming bill is an energy bill, rebranding it after pollster Stanley Greenberg instructed Democrats that “cap-and-trade” and “global warming” weren’t selling, and they had to rebrand it as “energy”.

Which calls into question the breathtaking courage, passion, etc. This is Kerry’s second cap-and-trade global warming bill just this Congress. After the first floundered, he came out muttering about how mean it is to describe the bill as cap-and-trade — the central component of both is cap-and-trade, of course — on the grounds that “I don’t know what cap-and-trade means” (he said that, incidentally, just after the Greenberg memo urging such abandonment). (more…)

In my book Red Hot Lies, I dedicated chapter one to the media’s gullibility, and worse, in enabling the global warming industry. Media service to weather or climatic panics goes back more than a century. One particularly amusing anecdote is the Los Angeles Times, which was among many outlets seizing on the fear of frozen stuff on the heels of the Titanic’s sinking at the hands of an iceberg, digging up an academic to say that the expanding ice would soon consume us all.

OK, so that’s just yellow journalism. And of course there’s the absurd slop-slash-ignorance in slavishly toeing the alarmist line. For example, in 2008 NBC showed B-roll footage of penguins to add the texture of charismatic fauna to a story claiming that Arctic ice melt of 2007 was destroying the Arctic (whose “past the point of no return” ice mass has, ahem, returned).

The real news story was how the hell those birds might have gotten to the other side of the planet from where they live. Two months later, NBC showed polar bears in a story about a supposedly melting (but according to observations, actually ice-mass gaining) Antarctic. Again, school kids would spot these errors. (more…)

Recently, USA Today ran a story about Michael Mann, the lead author of the debunked “Hockey Stick” fable and principal actor in ClimateGate. Specifically, the paper bemoans the inevitable slowing of Mann’s ultra-important, (even “stimulus”-funded) research due to McCarthyites like us skeptics who refuse to just accept an economically harmful ideological agenda ostensibly grounded in what has turned out to be the biggest scientific scandal of our time.

This strange assist in the ongoing effort to rehabilitate the warmmongers offers a nice opportunity to mention an email I just found going through a massive document dump from NASA under the Freedom of Information Act. These 1,500 pages were apparently produced at the 11th hour seeking to forestall litigation we had signaled was coming for NASA’s refusal to come into compliance with the transparency statute.

We’re still suing for their refusal to turn over entire categories of information for which the taxpayer paid, and which are highly relevant to the unfolding scandals, which withholding was not changed by these documents. We just have to go over the documents first.

And among the gems we found was an admission that NASA (specifically, its Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS and its GISTEMP data) passes no one’s test for credibility. Rather, according to NASA, it’s worse than the “CRU” temperature data that was the central issue in ClimateGate. That is the temperature record which we now know was for all intents and purposes fabricated. (more…)

In a lead editorial last month in the aftermath of the great Washington snowstorms, ”Lessons from the Snow”, the Washington Post took the stance that the  inundation that plagued D.C.  (like other points in the U.S.) was nothing but a freak weather event — each time — and not something we should expect in the future. That’s really quite something, on the heels of WaPo’s other outbursts of late..

Specifically, on the subject of whether to outsource or regularly manage snow removal duties, “we tend to agree with those who say that it doesn’t make fiscal sense for governments to buy equipment that will be needed once or twice a century.”

Got that? These storms are nothing we should expect to continue.

That’s a rather incongruous line for a decidedly activist outlet, what with all of the moonbattery tossed around like Mardi Gras beads, in response to skeptic mockery of the alarmists’ previous claims that winters are now a thing of the past thanks to man-made global warming. Not that it’s inconsistent with the position the skeptics mocked, mind you.

It’s just that the Post had already come out to join the lunacy by asserting that such storms were, too, precisely what we should expect thanks to man-made global warming. (more…)

The New York Times’ leading in-house global warming obsessive, Thomas Friedman, has quite a column today. It is more a tantrum, really, as so many of his offerings have verged on being of late, if one that I find, even for him, remarkably detached. Maybe it’s that possible conflict of interest — I’m not talking about the 7.5 bathroom Bethesda mansion with no visible signs of windmills marring the vista of Mr. “I am a clean-energy hawk. Green for me is not just about recycling garbage but about renewing America”…it’s just about other people having to look at the eyesores — but somehow he can’t even remember his own hobbyhorses when offering the world one another iteration of what is increasingly his only note. Let’s start there, with his favorite subject, “global warming.”

Today, in telling us how to turn the tide swamping his and other soft-ish totalitarians’ favored agenda, Tom says:

Here are the points I like to stress: 1) Avoid the term ‘global warming.’ I prefer the term ‘global weirding,’ because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes.

While he has already been called out elsewhere for being a little repetitive on this, allow me to say…Of course, you do, dear. (more…)

I’ve been scarce of late, with a lot of recent travel, then this past week crashing on a book the cite-check, dashing out for a magazine interview you won’t believe so I’ll see if it goes to print before mentioning it, and guest-hosting for G. Gordon Liddy. Instead of staying for the G-Man’s Tuesday show I had to bail and head back out to the country, as I would have been trapped in D.C. as opposed to at home by that latest installment of winter deluge that is, apparently, precisely what scientists have been predicting as a result of global warming. Even though severe winters returned a few years ago once we began cooling. More on that momentarily.

But before heading out after Monday’s show I sat in a cube at Radio America and worked on a chapter, while someone for some reason had MSNBC on a cube over. Really loud.

That was an experience, my first with the new, openly loony MSNBC (I’ve far too little time to waste watching revved up versions of broadcast media I abandoned years ago, as I had been informed was the case and which proved to be an understatement). It had a certain comical quality to it, if heavy-handed and fevered amid the collapsing of their hopeychangey candidate and his signature issues, Scott Brown, Sarah Palin having just looked out to see her shadow and another six years of tormenting them, and now severe winter weather. (more…)

So, now Keith Olberman tells us that the fifteen-year long “global warming” campaign all along meant “climate change” and that this in turn means that places supposed to get hotter get hotter and that places that are supposed to get colder — under global warming, er, climate change — get colder. We got that.

And his contextual example of the places that are getting colder is the U.S. this winter, well they were supposed to be getting colder, because they are. That’s how we figure out what was supposed to happen under their  theory: by watching whatever happens. That was precisely what was predicted. Or, at least, now, in the new weasel-wording of journalists, “consistent with” what they and expected.

But a civilian has copied me on an email he sent to James Hansen of NASA, longtime advisor to Al Gore and the man who helped create the issue for political purposes in that June 1988 Senate hearing in which the press were made really hot to help their coverage by defeating the air conditioning in the hearing room. Because that helped prove their theory (that room was supposed to get warmer, so…). True story, according to the man who chaired the hearing. I wrote about  it in Red Hot Lies.

So this gentleman raised some specific about problematic claims by Hansen’s office at NASA with which I will not bore you, here. But he appends a few media stories that I just thought might interest you now that the establishment press, a wholly invested partner in the global warming industry, are telling you that warming doesn’t mean warming you fool it really means change which means cooling so there. Only the small-minded focus on warming as meaning warming. Remember that. (more…)