The Global Warming Scare is Over and the Mainstream Media Haven't Even Noticed Yet

There is lagging behind and then there is being comatose. Although the North American press is lagging behind, the British and Indian newspapers are turning up the heat on the grand hoax that is known as Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). The turn against AGW has been caused by Climategate (the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia) and the recent damaging revelations about the use of non-peer reviewed articles originating from environmentalist lobby groups by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Nobel Peace Prize winning 2007 report.

The Daily Telegraph has been on the case for a while and even the Times of London has been digging up dirt on the IPCC. But even the left-leaning, The Guardian in the UK is harassing the AGW alarmists. See here and here.

On this side of the water, the major networks and newspapers slumber on. But Walter Russell Mead, writing in The American Interest, declares the AGW scare to be dead.

"The global warming movement as we have known it is dead. Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced to hoping for a ‘politically binding’ agreement to be agreed that would set the stage for the rapid adoption of the legally binding treaty. After the failure of the summit to agree to even that much, the movement went into a rapid decline.

The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.

After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all. This latest story in the London Times is yet another shocker; the IPCC’s claims that the rainforests were going to disappear as a result of global warming are as bogus and fraudulent as its claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. It seems as if a scare story could grab a headline, the IPCC simply didn’t care about whether it was reality-based."

Read the rest here. The editors of the National Review Online have a nice summary of the situation in which they put AGW in its proper historical context:

"Exaggeration and alarmism have been a chronic weakness of environmentalism since it became an organized movement in the 1960s. Every ecological problem was instantly transformed into a potential world-ending crisis, from the population bomb to the imminent resource depletion of the “limits to growth” fad of the 1970s to acid rain to ozone depletion, always with an overlay of moral condemnation of anyone who dissented from environmental correctness. With global warming, the environmental movement thought it had hit the jackpot — a crisis sufficiently long-range that it could not be falsified and broad enough to justify massive political controls on resource use at a global level. Former Colorado senator Tim Wirth was unusually candid when he remarked in the early days of the climate campaign that “we’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing — in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” (Not surprisingly, after Wirth left the Senate and the Clinton administration he ended up at the United Nations.)

The global-warming thrill ride looks to be coming to an end, undone by the same politically motivated serial exaggeration and moral preening that discredited previous apocalypses. On the heels of the East Anglia University “Climategate” scandal have come a series of embarrassing retractions from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding some of the most loudly trumpeted signs and wonders of global warming, such as the ludicrous claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear within 30 years, that nearly half of the Amazon jungle was at imminent risk of destruction from a warming planet, and that there was a clear linkage between climate change and weather-related economic losses. The sources for these claims turned out to be environmental advocacy."

Read the rest here.

The whole environmentalist or "Green" movement has suffered a deep loss of credibility among people capable of critical thinking because of the uncritical treatment of the movement by the mainstream media. If it were not for the Internet, the scandal would not have been exposed. I'm not sure the mainstream media will ever fully recover from this blow to their credibility.