NY Times Environmental Desk Goes the Way of Global Warming
By Alan Caruba
“What’s in worse shape””,
asked the Heartland Institute’s Director of Communications, Jim
Lakely, in a January 11th blog post. “The state of the Earth’s
climate? Or the state of the New York Times? Global temperatures are not rising
all that quickly, so the Earth is doing fine. Meanwhile, the Old Gray Lady is
shutting down its Environmental Desk
TheHeartland Institute has cause to
celebrate because it has led the effort to debunk the global warming hoax,
sponsoring international conferences that brought together the world’s leading
scientists and others to demonstrate how specious the alleged “science” of
global warming was and is. It did so in the face of a United Nations agenda to
advance the hoax and a compliant and cooperative media that did nothing to
dispute it.
In the interest of full
disclosure, I have been an unpaid policy advisor to The Heartland Institute for
many years, only once receiving a small grant many years ago to help fund
research involving the global warming hoax. These days donations to my blog
help sustain the effort.
As the planet enters its
seventeenth year in which temperatures have been steadily falling in response
to a natural cooling cycle, the result of reduced solar radiation, the global
warming hoax is finally being revealed as an instrument of the United Nations
and individual governments, including our own, to impose “carbon taxes” that
would raise billions of dollars for everyone involved.
The New York Times with its
vaunted reputation has been suffering the same fate as many daily newspapers in
the U.S., as well as news magazines such as Newsweek and
Time. The rise of the Internet has bled off advertising revenue, but I maintain
that as alternative sources of information became available, the Times and the
mainstream media has suffered a loss of credibility across the spectrum of news
topics.
In the case of the Times,
however, their journalistic sins were much worse than others because it led the
global warming hoax from its beginning, never failing to fill its pages about
rising sea levels (they’re not rising precipitously), declining polar bear
populations (they’ve increased), and using every weather event from hurricanes
to tornadoes to droughts (all cyclical and natural) to shout about a “global
warming” caused by carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gas emissions” that had
nothing whatever to do with a non-existent threat to the nation and the planet.
Bluntly stated, the
Times lied about global warming—now called “climate change”—on a daily basis.
The Times Environmental Desk
had a team of editors and reporters that never lost an opportunity to further
the greatest hoax of the modern era and one can only hope that reporters like
Andrew Revkin will be reassigned to cover high school football and soccer games
in the tri-state area. On his Facebook page, Revkin said he was never a fan of
the desk even though he worked for it and lamented the elimination of an
environmental editor. It is doubtful, however, that the Times will eliminate
its editors and teams that cover the White House, Congress, and other activities
of interest to readers, including sports.
Maybe it was just
serendipitous—the Times has been cutting back on staff for quite some time
now—but I believe the news that the poster boy of global warming, Al Gore, had
sold his television channel, Current, to al Jazeera, a notably anti-American
channel that gained fame broadcasting Osama bin Laden’s rants, was the “final
straw” that led to the decision to shut down its Environmental Desk.
In a January 11th
Wall
Street Journal commentary, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., wrote that “Mr. Gore and
his allies wore out their welcome with their exaggerations, their
self-righteousness, and their perfectly foolish insistence that a plurality of
voters could be morally bullied into giving up their self-interest if chastised
long and loudly enough by Mr. Gore.” His commentary took to task the lies of
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that extrapolated
from 1.58% of the Earth surface—the lower 48 U.S. states—to suggest a global
warming phenomenon.
The public did not rush to
purchase electric cars, nor did they install expensive solar panels on the
roofs of their homes. Instead they worried about the price of gasoline and the
rising cost of electricity and other expenses whose costs have been increased
by extraordinary bad “environmental” laws and regulations such as the
requirement that ethanol be added to each gallon, increasing is cost while
decreasing mileage, and destroying the engines under the hoods of millions of
automobiles. As forty percent of the nation’s corn crop was siphoned off to
make ethanol the cost of most food items at the supermarket increased as well.
The good news is that there
will not be an environmental editor or deputy environmental editor at the
Times, nor seven reporters whose sole job was to report lies intended to
advance and bolster the agenda of the Environmental Protection Agency, NOAA,
and the agendas of heavily funded environmental organizations such as the
Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and the World Wildlife Federation.
The “newspaper of record”
has debased itself and the profession of journalism for too long as a leading
participant in the progressive movement’s effort to impose socialism on the
greatest example of the power of capitalism and the free market—the United States—the world has ever known.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
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