Reeds vele malen hebben wij op Climategate.nl de aandacht gevestigd op de stelselmatige eenzijdige en tendentieuze berichtgeving van de mainstream media over klimaat. Perioden van opwarming worden breed uitgemeten; aan afkoeling wordt geen aandacht geschonken. Alles dat afbreuk kan doen aan de klimaathype wordt consequent genegeerd. Men is oh zo bang af te wijken van de politiek correcte lijn van die verschrikkelijke opwarming van de aarde (eigenlijk atmosfeer). Erkennen dat de klimaatsceptici wel eens gelijk zouden kunnen hebben – ook al is het maar een kleine beetje – is taboe en dient te worden doodgezwegen.

Maar ‘Investor’s Business Daily’ heeft al enige tijd met deze traditie gebroken. Onder de titel, ‘Don’t Tell Anyone, But We Just Had Two Years Of Record-Breaking Global Cooling’, wijst het blad op deze merkwaardige discrepantie. Ik pik er een aantal elementen uit.

Inconvenient Science

NASA data show that global temperatures dropped sharply over the past two years. Not that you’d know it, since that wasn’t deemed news. Does that make NASA a global warming denier?

Writing in Real Clear Markets, Aaron Brown looked at the official NASA global temperature data and noticed something surprising. From February 2016 to February 2018, “global average temperatures dropped by 0.56 degrees Celsius.” That, he notes, is the biggest two-year drop in the past century. …

Isn’t this just the sort of man-bites-dog story that the mainstream media always says is newsworthy?

In this case, it didn’t warrant any news coverage.

In fact, in the three weeks since Real Clear Markets ran Brown’s story, no other news outlet picked up on it. They did, however, find time to report on such things as tourism’s impact on climate change, how global warming will generate more hurricanes this year, and threaten fish habitats, and make islands uninhabitable. They wrote about a UN official saying that “our window of time for addressing climate change is closing very quickly.” ….

In other words, the mainstream news covered stories that repeated what climate change advocates have been saying ad nauseam for decades.

That’s not to say that a two-year stretch of cooling means that global warming is a hoax. Two years out of hundreds or thousands doesn’t necessarily mean anything. And there could be a reasonable explanation. But the drop in temperatures at least merits a “Hey, what’s going on here?” story.

What’s more, journalists are perfectly willing to jump on any individual weather anomaly — or even a picture of a starving polar bear — as proof of global warming. …

We’ve noted this refusal to cover inconvenient scientific findings many times in this space over the years.

There was the study published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate showing that climate models exaggerate global warming from CO2 emissions by as much as 45%. It was ignored.

Then there was the study in the journal Nature Geoscience that found that climate models were faulty, and that, as one of the authors put it, “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models.”

Nor did the press see fit to report on findings from the University of Alabama-Huntsville showing that the Earth’s atmosphere appears to be less sensitive to changing CO2 levels than previously assumed.

How about the fact that the U.S. has cut CO2 emissions over the past 13 years faster than any other industrialized nation? Or that polar bear populations are increasing? Or that we haven’t seen any increase in violent weather in decades? …

News outlets should decide what gets covered based on its news value, not on whether it pushes an agenda. Otherwise, they’re doing the public a disservice and putting their own already shaky credibility at greater risk.

Aldus de ‘Investor’s Business Daily’.

Lees verder hier.

Maar dat alles heeft natuurlijk betrekking op de VS. In ons land zijn we gelukkig gezegend met media die het publiek objectief en evenwichtig voorlichten over klimaat en zich niet opstellen als apostelen van het opwarmingsevangelie (grapje!).