On July 12th Coral Davenport reported for Politico:
Congress may or may not pass a serious climate bill this year, but one thing is certain: It won’t be business as usual.

Congress may or may not pass a serious climate bill this year, but one thing is certain: It won’t be business as usual.

While Republicans and polluting industries will celebrate, most know their victory will be fleeting…
Over the past year, the Environmental Protection Agency rolled out four rules that, in the absence of climate change legislation, eventually would give the executive branch command-and-control power to limit carbon pollution from power plants, factories

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As Mark Twain told us, there are three types of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. Unfortunately, Agence France-Press (AFP) reporter Marlow Hood reminds us of Twain’s truth in his April 29th article entitled “Sea ice loss major cause of Arctic warming.” Mr. Hood uses the typical statistic-manipulator tactic of cherry-picking data points and wording descriptions in a way likely to mislead the average reader.

Hood begins his article by claiming that “melting sea ice has dramatically accelerated warming in the Arctic” and continues to talk about data from 1989 to 2008, as if the present is irrelevant.

In fact, … Continue Reading

Stephen Dinan’s March 5th Washington Times article entitled “Climate scientists plot to fight back at skeptics” allows a climate alarmist  to assert that scientists “will never be able to compete with energy companies” when it comes to pushing their side of the debate.

The claim is false for several reasons:

• Energy companies have funded research on both sides of this debate, but spent more funding those “alarmists” who support claims of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (“AGW”).
• No

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Writing about the mainstream climatologists’ attempt to restore their credibility on March 2nd, John Broder of The New York Times all but dismisses the flaws in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report:

No scientific body is under more hostile scrutiny than the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which compiles the climate research of hundreds of scientists around the globe into periodic reports intended to be the definitive statement of the science and a guide for policy makers. Critics, citing several relatively minor errors in its most recent report and charges of conflict of interest

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Andrew Revkin and Tom Zeller filed a story for the December 9th New York Times on the Copenhagen Climate Conference reporting:

Asked about arguments by diplomats and some protesters that the United States should provide hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to developing nations as reparations, Mr. [Todd] Stern, the special envoy for climate change, bluntly fired back at a news conference. ‘I actually completely reject the notion of a debt or reparations or anything of the like,’ he said. ‘For most of the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, people were blissfully ignorant of the fact that emissions

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On December 4th, the BBC ran a story titled “Colleague defends ClimateGate professor” with a side-bar headed “CLIMATEGATE TIMELINE” reading:

19 Nov - Rumours appear on blogs that a hacker had obtained emails from CRU computers
20 Nov - UEA confirms emails and documents from CRU had appeared illegally on the internet”.

For brief, relevant background to the BBC’s role in the affair, note that their own Paul Hudson, who addresses “climate” issues, has acknowledged having had the material as of October 12, 2009, but sat on it. On that day the writer who admits to having received the information posted an … Continue Reading

The November 27th Washington Post had a front page headline under a Juliet Eilperin article reading: “China sets target for emission cuts. Premier to go to Copenhagen. Moves could signal progress in climate talks.”

The theme of the story is a looming, possible and very significant policy development, in which the United States would commit to binding, steep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions produced by combusting traditional energy sources (hydrocarbons or “fossil fuels”). This is a policy goal in favor of which the Post has aggressively editorialized. Other than massive expansion of nuclear power, there is no known way to … Continue Reading

The November 6th USA Today has an article by Dan Vergano titled, Gore’s book a toolbox for fixing climate crises, on former Vice President Al Gore’s new book, Our Choice, A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. Included in the article is the following paragraph:

The book resulted from two years of ‘Solutions Summits’ with scientists, economists and engineers, and lists four pages worth of contributors as well as 25 independent reviewers. The fact checking follows jibes over small errors in An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that turned Gore into an icon of climate change.

In fact, that film’s errors were … Continue Reading

A unattributed October 21st Associated Press article reports:

The industrialized world again in 2007 boosted, rather than reduced, its emissions of global-warming gases, the U.N. reported Wednesday, as international negotiators looked ahead to crucial climate talks in December.

But a search of the Web easily turns up news stories that show 2008 data, referring to numbers compiled by the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry (“IWR”). This data, when compared to the IWR’s prior year data, shows that CO2 emissions from the “industrialized world” dropped substantially in 2008 versus 2007 (although the IWR goes out of their way … Continue Reading

The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin published a story September 30th on Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and John Kerry (D-MA) “climate bill” which Eilperin reports:

aims to make deep cuts in U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions in the near and long term while setting a limit on the cost of carbon allowances, according to several sources and a close-to-final version of the bill obtained by The Washington Post.

The bill, which is still being revised, would make it easier for businesses to compensate for their carbon pollution by expanding the available pool of domestic offsets by 40 percent compared with the House-passed climate bill

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Several days before key Senators introduce that body’s version of controversial global warming “cap-and-trade” legislation, and several months after EPA whistle-blower Dr. Alan Carlin drew attention to the fact that the recent published scientific literature presents a decided tilt against prevailing “global warming” scientific wisdom, the New York Times has run a piece diminishing Dr. Carlin’s stature and findings. The September 24th John M. Broder article reads:

Alan Carlin, a 72-year-old analyst and economist, had labored in obscurity in a little-known office at the Environmental Protection Agency since the Nixon administration.

In June, however, he became a sudden celebrity with the

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The Associated Press’ Seth Borenstein published an article September 23rd, titled “NASA data: Greenland, Antarctic ice melt worsening.” The story opens, “New satellite information shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica continue to shrink faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode.”

Oddly, there is no mention of “runaway” in either the British Antarctic Survey’s press release or the research paper itself. Yet the lurid conclusion appears in the reporter’s first paragraph.

Although the paper at issue is already, as we see here, being spun as evidence of impending catastrophic sea level … Continue Reading

Reporting on President Barack Obama’s September 22nd address to the United Nations Climate Summit, USA Today’s Traci Watson writes:

The Earth isn’t waiting, scientists say.

If emissions keep increasing as they have, the planet’s average temperature will rise 3 to 7 degrees by 2100, according to the U.N. climate panel’s 2007 report.

But what Watson completely fails to tell her readers, is that the “3 to 7 degrees by 2100″ temperature increase is nothing but a estimate based on computer modeling. It does not reflect an actual observed rise in temperatures. Science is based on the collection observable evidence. And the … Continue Reading

In the context of Congress preparing topass controversial “cap-and-trade” legislation in the name of man-made global warming, the Washington Post ran a Juliet Eilperin September 4th article claiming “human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have helped reverse a 2,000-year trend of cooling in the Arctic, prompting warmer average temperatures in the past decade that now rank higher than at any time since 1 B.C.”

Other news outlets ran similar, uncritical treatments of a paper appearing in the September 3, 2009 online version of the journal Science. The lead author was Northern Arizona University professor Darrell S. Kaufman.

Although the Post quotes activists … Continue Reading

The Washington Times published a story September 1st by Amanda DeBard under the header: “Climate Change Bill To Boost Nuclear Plants” which starts out good:

Nearly half of the nation’s nuclear power plants stand to earn a windfall if the climate-change bill passed by the House becomes law.

But then DeBard goes on to report:

The bill will cause an “increase in revenues to carbon-free power sources like nuclear, and this is exactly what is supposed to happen,” said John Shelk, president of the Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA).
…
“The money isn’t really a ‘windfall profit,’ ” Mr. Shelk said. “Instead, it is

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A unattributed August 18th Associated Press story titled China Mulls Climate Resolution (printed in the Wall Street Journal), reports that China might vow that it will, or at least should, begin reducing its greenhouse gas emissions possibly around 2050. Early in the piece is a one-sentence paragraph, sandwiched between two others:

China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and has not set a cap on its emissions, believing it needs to continue to expand its economy and lift millions out of poverty. The country’s stance is expected to be key to a successful December U.N. conference in Copenhagen, which

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In the August 8th edition of The New York Times, columnist John M. Broder, who writes frequently for the paper on global warming issues penned a column titled, “Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security.” Broder reported on recent studies and exercises conducted by the military that looked at the security implications of global climate change. He then concluded:

a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest. If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus

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John Broder and James Kanter had a story in the July 7th New York Times titled Despite Shift on Climate by U.S., Europe Is Wary. The article accurately reveals that the U.S. stance on a binding if selective international treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions remains, in practice if not rhetoric, consistent under President Obama as it was under President Bush. With President Clinton having undertaken the gesture of signing, but refusing to seek ratification of, the Kyoto Protocol, this continues a long chain of consistent U.S. policy. One key characterization, however, presents a materially different circumstance than is the … Continue Reading

This Sunday on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos twice misrepresented a recent Congressional Budget Office report on the costs of the recently passed Waxman-Markey climate cap and trade legislation. First he interrupted President Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod asserting that the EPA pegged the cost of Waxman-Markey at “about $150 a year.” Later he through the same talking point at Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) asking:

And [Axelrod] did point to these Congressional Budget Office numbers which show it’s only about a $150 in 2020 for an average family.

First lets focus on the two facts Stephanopoulos got blatantly wrong: … Continue Reading