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How The Washington Post Is Censoring Climate Debate

March 14, 2015

By Paul Homewood  

 

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Reposted from the Daily Caller, this article from James Inhofe:

 

 

 

The Washington Post recently published an editorial attempting to discredit a recent speech I made on the U.S. Senate floor. I wanted to respond to the paper and set the record straight about why I gave the speech, so I submitted an op-ed and an alternative “Letter to the Editor” to the Washington Post.

The paper not only rejected my op-ed, but also rejected my letter to the editor because it did not fit within the parameters of debate that they set. This is not surprising. Much like Congressional Democrats’ recent efforts to chill the climate debate within the scientific community, the Washington Post, and many other entities in the mainstream media, are trying to control the climate debate in the public sphere. The paper had the liberty to respond to my floor statement with the points that they so desired, but did not give me the same opportunity in return.

I appreciate the Daily Caller for giving me a voice on this issue by publishing below my op-ed response I submitted to the Washington Post. The italicized portion is the material that I condensed for my second submission, which was a letter to the editor that was also rejected:

 

The Washington Post’s March 2 editorial proves my point: mainstream media consistently fails to report inconvenient facts that undermine climate hysteria. While mainstream media reports that 2014 was the warmest year on record, media fails to highlight that it was the “warmest year” by only 0.02 degrees Celsius. Furthermore, this NASA statistic has a standard margin of error of 0.1 degree Celsius, several times greater than the  “record-breaking” amount of 0.02 degrees Celsius. At a press conference, NASA’s GISS Director even rescinded the ‘warmest year’ headline, saying that there was only a 38 percent chance that 2014 was actually the warmest year on record.

Another topic that the media loves to link to climate change is the incidence of extreme weather when the reality is that not only do we not know much about extreme weather events, but there is almost no scientific consensus on what causes it.

According to the National Hurricane Center, there has been no change in the intensity of land-falling hurricanes, and hurricane activity is at its lowest point since the 1970s. Additionally, the U.S. is currently experiencing the longest absence of severe landfall hurricanes in over a century. Even the EPA itself has said that “weather can vary widely, and extreme events occur naturally.”

What is most troubling is the benighted complacency with which the mainstream media makes the case for human-caused global warming, looking only at a century’s worth of data in the face of millennia natural climate cycles and a limited understanding of CO2 impacts.

 

Read the rest here.

8 Comments
  1. manicbeancounter permalink
    March 14, 2015 2:01 pm

    The issue of whether 2014 was the warmest year shows that the climate consensus is using this self-censorship as a way of avoiding confronting the real world. They are stuck into agreeing with each other (without defining what exactly is agreed upon), and no contrary perspectives are allowed to be considered.
    If you believe, like I do, that science is about understanding the world, then this consensus is not scientific. The handling of a single statistic is but one more demonstration.

    • tom0mason permalink
      March 14, 2015 8:39 pm

      Well said.

  2. Sean permalink
    March 14, 2015 2:30 pm

    The Washington Post has gone from being a newspaper that held the government accountable to being a public relations channel for the government. They have actually become part of the elitist centralized federal establishment. I think Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the paper a couple of years ago was much more about lobbying people who believe in the power of the bureaucracy than it was a business decision. When you are approaching $100 billion in sales and have a market cap of $157 billion, its pays to be purchasing ink by the barrel if for no other reason than to discourage those who might want to attack it.

  3. FAH permalink
    March 14, 2015 2:48 pm

    I had a peculiar experience with the Wash Post about a month ago with respect to climate comments. I was commenting on a particular article, which was concerned with linking extreme events to global warming, and generally trying to point out the statistical difficulty of inferring such links (more precisely, differentiating from a zero trend) from available data. I thought I was making a little headway in communicating the general notion of the difficulty of concluding anything supportable from necessarily small subsets of extreme values of a distribution when mysteriously, my comments stopped being posted in the comment threads. I did an experiment and posted a test comment on another completely unrelated story in the WPost and my comments were posted normally in that comment thread. It was only in the comment thread of that particular climate related story that my comments were not appearing. To test what was going on, I created a different comment alias with a different email address and had no trouble completing the discussion. I have no empirical evidence that my comments were being disabled in that particular thread, but it certainly appeared to be the case.

    • March 23, 2015 8:30 pm

      I’ve had similar experiences. They seem to want to give the last word to a True Believer.

  4. John L permalink
    March 14, 2015 10:40 pm

    Throttling your opponent is always an effective way to silence him.
    However, when you are supposed to be selling “news”, who will buy it?

  5. tom0mason permalink
    March 14, 2015 11:26 pm

    Of course they do not wish for a debate or hear arguments against the laughable theory that CO2 controls the climate. To allow such a thing would expose and undermine the powerful and the rich insiders who have accrued even more power and wealth on propagating this nonsense. Power and money have perverted science.

    How dumb would it be if our leaders were shown to be so badly off the mark? If the public, despite all the media control, were to understand the basics, their respect for science, politicians, and all their backers would diminish drastically.

    Basics such as :-

    Here on this strange blue/green planet about 150 million km from its nearest star where all major forms of life are dependent on this star. That star, our sun, is our main source of energy and it controls all major aspects of the planet’s biosphere through its action on the planet’s chaotic climate.

    This world’s strange climate is, in the main, governed by the kinetic movement of, and energy transfers between the two main fluids on the planet’s surface — the gaseous atmosphere and the liquid water of oceans.

    From this standpoint it is an obvious observation that our climate is not governed by either one of these fluids in isolation but by the chaotic interactions between them. The transfer of mass (mainly water vapor and liquid/solid precipitation to and from the atmosphere and the oceans) and energy (thermal and kinetic within each fluid, and the exchanges between them) are the major players in how our climate changes; while the sun powers it all.

    Given the movements of these fluids are over irregular surface topographies on this spinning, roughly spherical planet where half the planet’s surface is bathed in warming sunlight, the other half in cooling dark shadow, complicates matters a lot. Not just linear complication that is easily resolvable through computational modeling, but also adds more sets of variables to the chaotic nature of the climate system. This renders accurate climate modeling, to this level, very complex and difficult, but it should be resolvable over time.

    On top of this system is LIFE. As all this physical movement and energy transfers happens, organic life dynamically extracts, stores, or releases all the chemicals and energy it requires to flourish. From minute to minute to decades and centuries, life continuously adapts, and attempts to change the climate system to best ensure survival. Nature, through its remarkable trial and error system mixed with the ‘survival of the fittest’ regime, ensures complex life is a major player in our climate system.

    Given the basic chaotic nature of our climate system, it is extremely difficult to accurately predict future trends. Individual parts of our climate system are understandable. Indeed many large parts of the system are well understood, some interactions are well modeled with computer simulations, however the totality of our climate system and its characteristics are not easily understood, and are not easy to model well on any computer system – there are just so many dependent and interdependent variables nested within myriads of complex feedback mechanisms. Truly then climate is a chaotic system.
    .
    .
    But then again, the UN-IPCC and Western government leaders can’t see such things. Their ‘science’ is settled. They propagandize never ending catastrophe based on CO2 and ‘greenhouse gases’ as the main climate control. This is utter nonsense and IMO, is why modern climate science is in such a mess.

  6. March 15, 2015 1:17 pm

    Cult
    Climate Superstitionists Cult
    ..and I see Inhofe ends by agreeing with me :
    “Being the religion that global warming is, the mainstream media continues to ignore the facts voiced by those concerned for the Obama administration’s extreme environmental agenda and the impact it will have on economic opportunities for future generations”

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