Red Hot Lies

How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed

Christopher C. Horner

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781596985384
• eBook ISBN: 9781596980747
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique en matière d'environnement et d'énergie

Liars--Al Gore, the United Nations, the New York Times. The global warming lobby, relentless in its push for bigger government, more spending, and more regulation, will use any means necessary to scare you out of your wits--as well as your tax dollars and your liberties--with threats of rising oceans, deadly droughts, and unspeakable future consequences of "climate change." In pursuing their anti-energy, anti-capitalist, and pro-government agenda, the global warming alarmists--and unscrupulous scientists who see this scare as their gravy train to federal grants and foundation money--resort to dirty tricks, smear campaigns, and outright lies, abandoning scientific standards, journalistic integrity, and the old-fashioned notions of free speech and open debate. In Red Hot Lies, bestselling author Christopher Horner--himself the target of Greenpeace dirty tricks and alarmist smears--exposes the dark underbelly of the environmental movement. Power-hungry politicians blacklist scientists who reject global warming alarmism. U.S. senators threaten companies that fund climate change dissenters. Mainstream media outlets openly reject the notion of "balance." The occasional unguarded scientist candidly admits the need to twist the facts to paint an uglier picture in order to keep the faucet of government money flowing. In the name of "saving the planet, " anything goes. But why the nasty tactics? Why the cover ups, lies, and intimidation? Because Al Gore and his ilk want to use big government at the local, state, federal, and global level to run your life, and they can brook no opposition. But the actual facts, as Red Hot Lies makes clear, aren't nearly as scary as their fiction.

CHAPTER 1

Media on a Mission

Lies, Distortions, Cover-Ups, and the Reporters Who Push Them

“I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is.”

Al Gore

A STRANGE THING HAPPENED RECENTLY. A shark ate a kangaroo. Here’s the odd part: the media didn’t blame “global warming.”¹

Today’s press breathlessly touts any occurrence—no matter how tenuously connected to the weather—as the result of Manmade global warming. A 2007 Reason Foundation paper aptly summarized the media coverage:

Global warming causes everything. A brief perusal of stories from the last several years reveals that warming has been blamed for a huge array of problems, including increased teenage drinking, stray cats, poison ivy, and sharks. More seriously, global warming has also been blamed for widespread malnutrition and outbreaks of disease, Hurricane Katrina, and the crisis in Darfur.²

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Don’t forget impoverished fashion houses,³ hard times for Bulgarian brothels,⁴ and attacks by big cats.⁵ It causes summer frost in Africa⁶ and freezing penguin chicks,⁷ poorly rising bread dough,⁸ “makes island kids bony, stunted,”⁹ contaminates transfusion blood,¹⁰ and causes more landslides,¹¹ and stronger earthquakes. ¹² It caused the 2008 salmonella outbreak,¹³ and an increase in kidney stones.¹⁴ Blogger William Briggs compiled media assertions of other global warming horrors: “Lizards will undergo sex changes,¹⁵ there will be ‘waves of rape,’¹⁶ a rash of camel deaths will occur, ¹⁷ the Earth will spin faster¹⁸ (hold on!), and, worst and most frightening of all, there will be an increase in lawyers¹⁹ (to handle all the ‘who’s fault is it?’ litigation ).”²⁰ Oh yeah, it will also cause giant Burmese pythons to colonize one-third of the United States.²¹

Why, they have even blamed the sacking of English football coaches on global warming,²² though sometimes the mainstream media leave it to the popular scientific outlets to warn us of outcomes like “Global warming poses deaf threat to tropical fish.”²³ After all, they don’t want to look foolish.

INSTITUTIONALIZED HYSTERIA

The establishment media organs go to mind-bending lengths to carry water for the alarmist industry of which they clearly are now part. They regularly hype, and even repeat as gospel, claims that are unsubstantiated or simply unsupportable were they to ask around, while refusing to respect or acknowledge the preponderance of recent studies contradicting the cries of alarm. They refuse to correct mistakes—when these errors are on the side of alarmism—or report on alarmist scientists being forced to correct themselves, even when scandalous. But when exposure of these scandals requires rehabilitation of their allies, stories pour forth minimizing the revelations.

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Everyone down to Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest weighs in, while a still-skeptical public leaves the industry bible, Columbia Journalism Review, to navel-gaze about “why the media have failed to explain climate change in a way the public ‘gets.’”²⁴ Conclusion? One Max Boycoff pleads that “it’s not that balanced reporting needs to be shunned when addressing climate-change issues . . . . It just needs to be used much more carefully.” He even laments, “To make matters worse, the global-warming stories that do make it onto the front page tend to concern the most contentious aspects of climate science.” That is, the front page of news sections should be reserved, or at least have substantial portions set aside, for non-news scare stories. Actual discourse, if one must allow it, should be shuffled off to less prominent placement.

Sure enough, in the ultimate act of desperation, they ban the opposing viewpoint from their outlets.²⁵ Consider Time magazine, which has over the past few years run a series of increasingly frantic alarmist cover stories which detail impending doom but without the slightest trace of an effort at balance.²⁶ When MSNBC interviewed Managing Editor Richard Stengel, he was at least honest about Time’s mission.

“One of the things that’s needed in journalism,” Stengel said, “is that you have to have a point of view about things.. .. You can’t always just say ‘on the one hand, on the other and you decide.’ People trust us to make decisions. We’re experts in what we do. So I thought, you know what, if we really feel strongly about something let’s just say so.”²⁷ So, Time editors “feel strongly” about new taxes in the name of the environment and expensive, climatically meaningless regimes in order to show the rest of the world the seriousness of our purpose. It’s still a mystery what Stengel was talking about when he said “we’re experts in what we do.”

The flagship alarmist outlet, the New York Times, perfectly demonstrated its zealotry with its coverage of “dead zones” in the ocean. An editorial in March 2008 titled “Oceans at Risk” blamed “global warming” for these patches of low oxygen.²⁸ The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, located nearer the problem at issue although as a rule nearly as alarmist as the Times, revealed that such dead zones had appeared before—forty years ago, during the three-decades long cooling .²⁹

Less alarming (or at least less useful) claims typically are of no interest. Little ink is spilled explaining how birds, fleas, and trees produce more CO₂ than humans,³⁰ or that cows’ CO₂ and methane emissions dwarf those from autos.³¹ Well, silly, we aren’t looking to regulate birds, trees, or fleas!

The media have no use for realities such as how deaths and death rates from all extreme weather events have been dropping for decades in the U.S. as well as globally.³² Further out of character would be discussing how society’s wealth (precisely what their favored regulations threatens) empowers people to adapt if climate —as it constantly has for recorded history—changes.³³

“There is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition.”

Richard S. Lindzen, PhD
Professor of Meteorology, MIT

Although even the less ridiculous-sounding claims of global warming impacts, such as disappearing honeybees³⁴ and increased heart attacks³⁵ were soberly debunked, the debunking was largely ignored.³⁶ Similarly, the establishment press showed zero interest in covering a compendium of work by skeptical scientists undermining the “consensus” premise upon which Congress is seeking to make trillion-dollar decisions.³⁷

When Republican U.S. senator James Inhofe produced a list of peer-reviewed work by more than 400 scientists countering the “consensus,” the Times mentioned it only in a blog, where it was dismissed as “a distraction.” But when forty-four Baptists, led by a 25-year-old seminarian, got really worried about Man-made climate change, it was a newsworthy development.³⁸

The Washington Post gave page-16 treatment to a meeting of hundreds of “skeptics” in a piece offering alarmists plenty of space to criticize it—with name-calling only, and not one substantive remark³⁹—but gave front-page, uncritical treatment the very next week to another in a series of claims by well-known alarmists that they’ve got a computer model saying that things will be much worse than previously thought.⁴⁰ So the media have an agenda, which justifies disparate treatment based upon what is said or who says it. Shocking, no?

GOOD, OLD FASHIONED WEATHER

These double-standards are legion: unseasonably warm weather is clear evidence of global warming, while exceptional cold is merely an anomaly. Warm weather and retreating glaciers are signs of warming; cool weather and advancing glaciers are signs of nothing. Oh, sure, occasionally cooling is proof of warming, such as when the Washington Post hilariously spun the Old Farmers Almanac projection of a cold 2008-2009 winter—the cooling to possibly continue to for decades.⁴¹ It seems that this shows how warming has now made climate modeling very difficult, as shown by the fact that they keep modeling warming only to actually get cooling.

And, of course, it is crucial to unearth who funds the groups that dispute alarmism, or whose profits depend on resisting regulation; but who’s funding the alarmists (say, for a $300 million campaign), and who would profit from a slew of new regulation or climate-directed subsidies—that’s not news. Three years is a pattern . . . unless it is three years of cooling. Ten years of something is conclusive, unless during that period—such as is the case with the past decade—there has been no warming.

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In early 2008, when confronted with more than three years of cooling, the media felt the need to discuss this “cold spell.” It’s just a meaningless aberration in the face of a bigger picture—and any fool knows we are warming, we were told. The New York Times suddenly found discrete weather events and temperatures not indicative of things to come. Times reporters located the phone numbers of some scientists who felt that weather was, well, weather, and not every blip of the thermometer foretells some irrevocable trend. These same sober scientists who were so “distracting” when they denied that past warming was part of an irreversible march, were now worth quoting. The cold trend, we learned, was “just good old fashioned weather.”⁴² This is the very same thing that they would have said about warm weather and storms had the Times sought to ask them during those episodes—which, of course, they didn’t.

In an amazing fit of sobriety which was not to last, the Times decided that “if anything else is afoot—like some cooling related to sunspot cycles or slow shifts in ocean or atmospheric patterns that can influence temperatures—an array of scientists who have staked out differing positions on the overall threat of global warming agree that there is no way to pinpoint whether such a new force is at work.” This paragraph belongs in every climate story but appears in almost none. This is the same line that “skeptics” rightly tout in the face of any such period of weather or discrete event; it is the alarmists who will admit it only in this very inconvenient situation. It was useful here because observations were contrary to the Times’ agenda.

The media are clearly undone by such things. Times columnist Thomas Friedman, ABC’s reliably absurd Bill Blakemore, the Las Vegas Sun, and Times editorialists, among others, immediately followed suit in one fashion or another, generally berating climate realists for seizing on the cooling for their cynical purposes as the warming industry and establishment media do every week. In the meantime, the calmer voices were then ignored until the next time they could be trotted out to assure the public that calamitous warming still awaited them.

EDITING THE RECORD

When the media forget their lines, they readily revert to form when slapped with a reminder by their green colleagues. For example, “Global Temperatures ‘to decrease,’” read the April 4, 2008 headline. Which lying shill for the oil industry was publishing this claptrap? The British Broadcasting Corporation. BBC News environmental analyst Roger Harrabin was the author, and the quotation in the headline came from the head of the World Meteorological Organization.⁴³

Such outrageous lack of catastrophism by the BBC raised the ire of the pressure group “Campaign Against Climate Change.” One of its activists, Jo Abess, wrote e-mails complaining to Harrabin, objecting to his article as a “piece of media that seems like it’s been subject to spin or skepticism.” God forbid a journalist apply an ounce of skepticism! Actually, she meant that by reporting unalarming news he was parroting climate skepticism and, in her complaint, she specifically instructed him to never quote skeptics. This non-scientist, with no apparent qualifications other than being a green pressure group agitator, railed to him about how non-scientists were distorting the debate. Yet the offensive quote in Harrabin’s piece came neither from a skeptic nor a non-scientist, but the head of the WMO—parent of the IPCC—who happened to say something insufficiently gussied up with alarmist bells and wh...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1 - Media on a Mission
• CHAPTER 2 - Fear and Loathing
• CHAPTER 3 - The Establishment Attacks
• CHAPTER 4 - Stifling Everyone’s Speech
• CHAPTER 5 - Poisoning the Little Ones
• CHAPTER 6 - Big Government
• CHAPTER 7 - Stupid Science Tricks
• CHAPTER 8 - The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• CONCLUSION
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright Page