Climate Alert: “We Must Substantiate Planet Warming!”

by Christopher C. Horner

Over the weekend I received an email that, on its face, might appear to be rather strange. It read: “planet warming is a serious issue that must be substantiated immediately!”

What’s facially odd is that this insistence on the truth of the author’s belief, and clarion call for comrades to somehow back said dogma up, came on a list-serve for the “World Environmental Journalists”. To be honest, I have no idea how I got on this list, but I do read the missives regularly and the message was fairly typical in its tone and content.

iceberg

The entirety actually read “[J]ust to restate the obvious (I’ve personally experienced the effects while researching my global islands project): planet warming is a serious issue that must be substantiated immediately!”

Although a quick search revealed the author boasting of personal experience with planet warming to be more an activist than a professional journalist, his activism is common among the profession. I mention this in the context of noting how the media are treating – rather, refusing to treat – that about which they would be in hysterics if it were warming rather than cooling.

That is, last week we learned that summer ice melt in the Antarctic was the lowest in the entirety of the thirty-year satellite record. This is consistent with the ongoing cooling and ice mass gain of the South Pole confounding the climate models, all of which say that warming occurs first and worse at the polar regions (“polar amplification”). This most basic premise of Warming 101 explains why, for example, Al Gore used to fume that “the polar ice caps are melting”. Though he has scaled back his exaggeration to now say “the North Polar ice cap”, there’s a world of difference between the former result that would be a possible signal of greenhouse warming, and a regional – and, it turns out, presently reversing – phenomenon.

What’s that? You didn’t read about this? Alas, it does seem that because things aren’t occurring as scripted you are deprived of such stories in the establishment press which, as coincidence has it, splashed the very same lead author’s work, previously, when it had happened to indicate melting. So although he is therefore the height of credibility, he just isn’t all that important when his conclusion is not helpful to their preferred narrative.

All sorts of similar outcomes are on display as Arctic ice relentlessly gains mass year-over-year and we find ourselves shivering and snowbound in many places earlier in October than is normal. The industry that made its bones shrieking about discrete, local events (when they were warm or dry) now insists that recent cooling and earlier, heavier snowfall already this October mean nothing when discussing “global warming” (now “climate change”). The only hint of such inconvenient observations in the elite media are when they gain traction among larger audiences than our superiors would like, at which point Paul Krugman or another of like kind and quality will sneer that these truths should be ignored even harder expressly because they are being used by those who reject their agenda to spread doubt about the agenda.

And the agenda, we have learned, is most important of all. More important even than basic civility or honesty, as I laid plain in “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed”.

Or, to put it bluntly, advocates including journalists must labor to “substantiate planet warming”. And particularly after all this time and money spent on the endeavor, that admission really says it all.


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Posted Oct 12th 2009 at 1:00 pm in Environment | 72 Comments