PrintFebruary 14, 2011
Reuters Searches High and Low to Find AGW
This winter's frigid cold must be demoralizing the leftist big media conglomerates. Last month, Reuters reported that Britain suffered the coldest December since record keeping began a century ago, and that the US would likely suffer its coldest January in at least 26 years. By early February, blizzards blanketed much of the US, as jaded residents from New Mexico to Maine muttered sarcastic lines such as, "I just shoveled 19 inches of global warming off my driveway. Where are those snow-free winters the Democrats promised?"
But big media continues to help the Democrats push their stalled trillion-dollar carbon tax out of the snow bank -- even though journalists must report from thousands of miles away to escape global cooling. Here's an excerpt of the latest global warming alarmism from Reuters in Anchorage:
Since the mid-1970s, Alaska has warmed at three times the rate of the Lower 48 states, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And with nearly two-thirds of U.S. national parkland located in Alaska, the issue of climate change is especially pressing there, officials say.In some far northern parks such as Gates of the Arctic, average temperatures are expected to shift in coming years from below freezing to above freezing, crossing a crucial threshold, said Bob Winfree, Alaska science adviser for the Park Service."The effects of melting ice and thawing permafrost, I think, will be major," Winfree said.Winfree is helping lead a new three-year, $500,000 climate scenario project in Alaska intended to identify and cope with the warming trend. That is part of a $10 million program to plan for and mitigate climate change in parks nationwide.
This story reeks of journalistic malpractice. For instance, the EPA has a multi-billion-dollar incentive to find global warming and, presto, they found it! --While censoring respected in-house experts that disagreed. In its story, Reuters also inadvertently revealed that the National Park Service has a ten million-dollar conflict of interest, but included no opposing views. If Halliburton were paid $10M to find global cooling, would Reuters blindly accept Halliburton's claim that it had indeed found it?
Reuters also neglects to mention that there was global cooling in the mid-1970s, so any comparisons to that era would be biased. Did Reuters intentionally make a flawed comparison?
And Reuters doesn't even consider whether global warming might be good. A thousand years ago, during the Medieval Warm Period, wheat and barley were grown in northern Norway and the population of Western Europe flourished, due to abundant food. Perhaps someday Alaska will have vineyards, just as Greenland had a millennium ago, when it was much warmer than it is today. Does Reuters think improved nutrition is bad?
