The Washington Post had a story on Sunday titled, in its print edition, “Obama’s return to Europe in a changed world”. It chronicled how “the dominant themes of the president’s European tour, set to begin Monday, highlight how much the world has changed over that time. As he enters the second half of his term, security issues, in South Asia and the broader Middle East, have replaced the economy as the chief shared interests of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful allies.”

Er…what? The absence of a certain ‘greatest threat facing mankind’ is a bit of a red-flag for someone who has chronicled the establishment press having thrown in completely with (selective) political hysteria over the climate issue, and the havoc that ’skeptics’ of the computer model projections and the policies have allegedly caused. And, incidentally, with no interest in the havoc the actual models have caused here in the real world through policies premised in them.

I scanned the full-page article for mention of Obama’s swift reversal of Bush’s alleged recklessness or, barring that, of the now surely worsened climate crisis and the stalled Kyoto process, that Obama didn’t, in fact, rush to ’sign the Kyoto Protocol’ as Bush supposedly neglected per the media for eight years (Clinton signed it; Bush never unsigned it), comfortable I would find no such cheerleading, or keening.

That is of course because of the uncomfortable truth that political realities led Obama to continue the Bush policy of continuing the Clinton-Gore policy of not seeking ratification of Kyoto. And, further, he continued the Bush rejection of the Kyoto model, agreed to by Clinton-Gore to the great foreign policy and otherwise political detriment to the U.S. in ensuing years.

And, on cue, a story in a trade press outlet yesterday writes:

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Imagine if a Bush administration official had said this:

“For most of the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, people were blissfully ignorant of the fact that emissions caused a greenhouse effect. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon.”

That was the Obama administration’s “special envoy for climate change”, Todd Stern. Now, the Industrial Revolution is generally accepted as having begun in or about 1850. And of course Svante Arrhenius famously posited the greenhouse effect hypothesis in 1896 (and as a very beneficial thing, incidentally). So, it’s fair to say that this claim is somewhat off.

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