Climate Change Propaganda Versus Facts (Part 1)

Climate Change Propaganda Versus Facts (Part 1)

– By Howard Sierer –

If climate change really is the “existential threat” that the media would have us believe it is, why are we fed a steady stream of propaganda instead of facts?

It only takes seeing a diesel engine’s dirty exhaust or spending a day in Beijing to know that humans negatively impact the environment. And there is little doubt that humans are having some impact on climate. But the amount of that impact is still quite uncertain as compared to the natural forces that have changed climate over millennia.

Convinced that humans are the dominant source of change, activists faced the problem of drawing attention to a slowly evolving phenomenon that, unlike diesel exhaust or a day in Beijing, is easily ignored. To overcome public apathy, they spun tales of doomsday scenarios to motivate public support for carbon dioxide reductions.

Responding to these predictions, the world’s media swept aside responsible fact-checking in favor of blind repetition of the most extreme climate claims.

The federal government’s 2017 Climate Science Special Report hyperventilated that in the lower 48 states the “number of high-temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low-temperature records.” Fact: there’s been no increase in the rate of new record highs since 1900, only a decline in the number of new lows. Unsurprising since we’ve been emerging from the Little Ice Age since about 1850.

A 2019 report by the National Academies of Sciences proclaimed that the “magnitude and frequency of certain extreme events are increasing” yet provided no data to back up the claim. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the planet’s “go to” source for climate assessments – says all such claims should be treated with “low confidence.”

MIT Ph.D. and Obama Energy Department Under Secretary for Science Steven Koonin goes further, saying, “The report was written more to persuade than to inform. It masquerades as objective science but was written as – all right, I’ll use the word – propaganda.”

The New York Times is representative of how the media repeat climate propaganda without any honest attempt at fact-checking. The paper wouldn’t want facts to get in the way of its preferred narrative.

Here’s a sampling of its breathless and hysterical reporting:

“…how to avert a climate catastrophe…greenhouse gas emissions are still rising dangerously…we are sleepwalking toward a climate catastrophe and need to wake up and take urgent action.”

More from the Times: “The summary findings are bleak. Countries have failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions despite repeated warnings from scientists, with China and the United States, the two biggest polluters, further increasing their emissions last year.”

Yet facts from the Times’ hyperlinked stories themselves expose the paper’s biases and its penchant for climate change propaganda. China is given a pass in its story’s headline that notes that China’s CO2 emissions “grew less than expected.”

But the U.S is faulted for growing its 2018 emissions by 2.7 percent, “the second-largest increase since 2000.” True, but buried well down in the article’s text, the increase came only after “three years of continuous decline.” Most readers would never get to the fact that the 2018 rise was attributed to “stronger economic growth” and “colder weather.”

The U.S. is the only developed country that has made significant, consistent reductions in its greenhouse gas emissions in recent years, thanks primarily to natural gas replacing coal for power generation. Natural gas is plentiful and its price has dropped dramatically thanks to fracking. Don’t expect to read that in the Times.

Climate science is incredibly complex so it’s natural that reporters would throw up their hands and parrot alarming headlines without due diligence: impending doom sells well in newspapers and on websites. The doomsday narrative is mostly an invention of journalists for their own convenience: it relieves them of having to understand a complicated subject.

Here’s an egregious example of media irresponsibility: the extreme leftist website Axios told its politically engaged readership that the way to “be smart” about climate change is to understand that “In climate science, one side is the scientific consensus, and the other is a small but vocal faction of people trying to fight it.” In other words, Axios thinks it’s “smart” to see a complex issue as good guys vs. bad guys, believers vs. deniers.

As a result of this kind of media propaganda, vast swaths of the public believe life itself on this planet hangs in the balance. Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg has become an international celebrity, blaming world leaders when she says, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood.” Dramatic, emotional theater: just the stuff of propaganda.

Next week’s column will discuss how long-time, well-respected climate change alarmists have come to recognize that much of their alarm was based on faulty assumptions. As a result, the false claim of scientific consensus on manmade climate change is yielding to a much more realistic – and hopeful – assessment of the future.

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