From Roger Pielke Senior: Bias In News Reporting
There is a press release on a paper yesterday from NCAR titled Record High Temperatures Far Outpace Record Lows Across U.S.
I plan to post on the paper on which this news article is based next week ( it has major problems, as already identified at Watts Up With That). However, today, I want to just compare the news exposure of three press releases, one of which supports a surface temperature changes from the human addition of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (the NCAR press release), and two others which present other explanations for at least part of the surface temperature increases.
The NCAR press release as of 10am EST November 13 2009 has 95 links (under the lead author) at google news.
The other two press releases are
“Study gives clearer picture of how land-use changes affect U.S. climate” from Purdue which has 3 links (under any of the co-authors) in google news where the press relase has the text
“What we highlight here is that a significant trend, particularly the warming trend in terms of temperatures, can also be partially explained by land-use change,” said Dev Niyogi, a Purdue earth and atmospheric sciences and agronomy professor, and the Indiana state climatologist.”
New Idea offered to fight climate change from Georgia Tech which has 6 links (under the author’s name) in google news where the press release has the text
“Across the (United States) as a whole, approximately 50 percent of the warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes (usually in the form of clearing forest for crops or cities) rather than to the emission of greenhouse gases,” Stone said. “Most large U.S. cities … are warming at more than twice the rate of the planet as a whole — a rate that is mostly attributable to land use change.”
The news community clearly has a bias in its reporting.
In my fields of science, we were taught how to test for experimental bias. How do we control and isolate temperature variables? In city temperature readings, we are seeing them rise and set records but do we have records in the country? Where can we test temperture increase and also see low CO2 readings? How do we test for cloud cover and it’s effect? I suspect many experiments are don with presupposed causes and outcomes.
Global warming ELECTED the current US administration – and Pelosi’s domination of the US House of Representatives in the election right before – in Nov 2006.
Global warming is pushed and propagandized BY the socialist media FOR the socialist agenda for the benefit of the international socialist government agencies (taxes and carbon “trading” and direct handouts to the corrupt 3rg world and 4th world dictatorships. Non-government agencies (all with a “nice-sounding” “feel-good” agenda) plus their self-centered fund-me-fund-me I’m helping people agenda are likewise benefiting from the AGW propaganda and the attack-the-western-world/attack-the-US behind the AGW propaganda.
I said above the the Obama administration was elected by global warming: My logic follows.
Pelosi used her power in the House to restrict oil production, off-shore drilling, Alaskan pipelines, and pushed heavily the “alternate-but-more-expensive” fuels agenda dreamed of by the AGW ecotheists. That combined effort – starting in srping 2007 when here power over legislation started – began driving up fuel prices from their long-term steady, slowly increasing rate to the tremendous highs of January-February 2008. Right when the primary season for presidential politics began. As fuel price rose, the economy tanked. As it always has since the early 70’s.
Drops in employment, auto, trasde, steel, crops, and everything else shipped or produced immediately followed – and the current recession began. THAT recession fuelded the housing and mortgage crisises that collapsed Wall Street and the banks in early Spetember and October – just in tiome for the democrats “first (failed) economic support packages . Cleverly, they (the democrat) can properly blame these early fight-the-recession policies (and their budget-busting inflationary numbers) on Bush, which also turned off conservatives from voting for McCain and protects liberal demcorats from criticism. The smiles on the democrat faces as they got their first stimulus package in Sept 2008 tells it all: their strategy was complete. The republicans were defeated in Sept, and merely had to use the media to hold off rallies until the November votes were counted.
Did she (Pelosi and her cohorts) really want the the economy to stay as bad as it has, for as long as it has?
Some do. They intensely hate capailism, and want all capitailm system,ms (particularly the US) to fail. Others probaly do not, but cannot fight the extremists, nor theinertia that is still slowly economy.
Note that oil prices dropped immediately when the artificial research limit and developments expired on October 1, 2008, and have stayed low since then, but by Oct 1, the damage had been done.
Janet Raloff has a science blog at Science News. I’ve subscribed to the magazine since 1969, so I hope she isn’t too annoyed that I often post a counterpoint to many of her posts. She covered this at http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49508/title/Record_chills_are_falling%2C_but_only_in_number
Raloff is an active member of the Society of Environmental Journalists which may be behind a lot of the biased journalism about the climate. See http://www.sej.org/initiatives/climate-change/overview for, well, an overview.
I suspect that it won’t be until the SEJ changes their views that most media reports that look into the missed predictions of AGW and now CC will be from the news side of the media.
Roger Pielke Sr. wrote, “The news community clearly has a bias in its reporting..
Does someone give out an “Understatement of the Year” award? I have found my nominee. 😉
Clearly the media needs a tone control as well as a balance control. 😉
It is truly amazing that more and more people are joining the ranks of unbelievers despite this overwhelming bias. The reason for this has to be the internet and sites like WUWT where people find they are not alone in their views and then spread the word.
Well, the MSM that gave us Mao Bama aren’t going to print anything that would contradict him, are they?
I’m still waiting for Rock Hudson and Tony Randall to show up to tout this latest version of VIP.
Considering the anthropogenic warming effects; land use, UHI, eliminating rural measurements, siting problems, etc., then throwing in natural variations, which have to be on the order of .3°-.5°C, where exactly does the so called ‘CO2 pollution’ have any discernable effect on climate let alone the silicon prophesies of catastrophe?
The problem here is that the major media organs are no longer free to print what they want, as ownership has passed to people who use it to generate ‘public opinion’ which appears to be sympathetic to their agenda.
More and more people are turning away from the main-stream media because or this bias/spin and now rely places like WUWT, for example, to find out what’s really going on.
So cities are warming at twice the rate of the countryside. And where do we get our temperatures from? Oh yes, the cities.
How about the actual heat itself produced by combustion of fossil fuels? Gasoline at about 126,000 BTUs per gallon, diesel fuel at 136,000 BTUs per gallon, fuel oil at about the same, coal, any fossil fuel combusted does actually directly heat the near Earth atmosphere. And then there are the huge amounts of asphalt concrete which has been placed on streets, roads, parking lots, and the large area covered by asphalt shingles. Asphalt does convert solar radiation to heat, and lots of it at high temperatures, when the sun shines on it, and stores much of the heat to release after dark, raising the temperature during the dark hours well above what it would have been otherwise.
These temperature changes are real, and have to have been increasing with the huge amount of development which has occured during the 20th Century. And these increases in temperature are always where the temperature measuring stations are located.
Not that these slight changes in temperature are significant to our well being, or the planet’s well being, but the average changes in temperature which have been published that I have seen have been tiny indeed themselves.
Of couse, with the real increases in heat cited above, there would be no “tipping point”, and no need at all to worry about them. But actually determining the total of them would upset the real agenda of the warmmongers.
There have been points in time where an average decrease in temperature has occurred which caused untold and unmeasurable grief to humans. Always from “natural” geologic events. Famine ruled over what is called “western civilization” and masses of people died from either starvation, or famine induced illnesses.
One such was “The year without a summer”, 1816. And for “weather” events, there were the huge rain storms in all of California during the winter of 1861-1962. I have seen where some have attempted to blame the mining operations of the Gold Rush a decade earlier for the flooding which occured. I have done a considerable amount of hydraulic engineering, and were equivalent rain storms to happen as of now, all of the flood control protection which has been constructed in California since would be of little, if any, use at all. most of the human constructed “improvements” in California would once again be washed out to the ocean or destroyed by massive flooding.
Perhaps we would be better off saving back resources and money to aid the survivors as best we can when such events occur in the future, which they most certainly will, rather than spend our treasure uselessly trying to combat non defeatable Nature.
Then again, perhaps we should just let the eco-whackos get their way, and unpave the Los Angeles River and return it to its “natural” condition, as they so much want to do . Within no more than 5 or 10 years, Californians would have quite enough to occupy themselves to keep them busy, trying to identify the large numbers of dead bodies left after the massive flooding which would certainly occur.
Until the people awaken, most especially the youth of the nation there will be no change of policy. The youth only see what is taught in school and they now devote only about 10 pages for everything that happened prior to 1980. In my grand daughters civics book there is less than one (1) page devoted to the War between the states, The one that most affected state sovereignty. We will continue to slide down the slippery slope until science is properly supported by academia, from grade school completely through the icons of higher learning. Agenda science isn’t science it is agenda. Agenda driven journalism isn’t NEWS it is agenda. We need by the force of our economic power (unsubscribe, cancel and refute, cease to purchase from the supporting companies that own the media outlets, and those that advertise there in.) that the “News outlets” report the news and not the opinion of the owner/editor. They have their opinion just give us the facts and let us make our own decision. Currently they are leading to them the great unwashed by the ring through the nose of spin to a foregone conclusion that they dictate by their bias.
OK rant off. And I do apologize for the rant. I am just sick and tired of being taken as an idiot by those that would control my thoughts and think that I am unable to think and form an intelligent opinion or conclusion.
I am looking forward to the post by Pielke Sr.
Bill Derryberry
They got rid of a lot of those pesky rural stations back around 1990.
Bias in news reporting? What I see for years now is more “conditioning”.
Have mentioned this one in a post few days ago:
Conservative German WELT has published another climate-related article, opened by a picture of an Indian woman crossing a dry riverbed, with the title “Climate change in action”. Really?
We can expect to see the very same riverbed shown 6 months later, overflowing with water, and same explanation.
It comes as journalism, but it is very primitive manipulation.
AGW-theory came as science, but turned out to be manipulation, as never seen before. Nicely put together.
There is a danger MSM should become aware slowly: If the AGW bubble bursts, then they will lose more than a handful of subscribers. They will lose their very reason for being as a trustworthy source of news and opinions.
“They will lose their very reason for being as a trustworthy source of news and opinions.”
That virtually collapsed long ago. The telltale signs? Plummeting ratings around the world as intelligent people flock to alternative information sources. Real people don’t listen to Big Brother, brother.
The NCAR press release states: “If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even.”
Is that known to be true? I know it seems intuitive, but to my simple view night time temps are driven by loss of energy so potentially there is a limit on the downside, while daytime temps have a huge energy source in the Sun driving them. Thus is there potential for more high records than lows?
The MSM perceives (“knows”) that readers won’t stick with a complicated article. Why try to explain point and counterpoint at the risk of readers not sticking with it.
This is the hurdle the truth has to climb in the face of a very simple, strong AGW story. The thing is that it is just easier for them to keep sticking to the mantra than to actually do some good journalism.
@Bill in Vigo: you are right. The younger generations are not being taught to think critically about environmental issues today. And it is too politically incorrect to question the environmental orthodoxy. Sometimes I despair. Changes cannot come soon enough.
Verity
MSM should start to worry. While not related to AGW, a Harris/Decima poll in Canada has concluded that the MSM has over hyped “problems” with the H1N1 vaccine roll out here in Canada. see http://www.harrisdecima.ca/index.php?q=releases/2009/11/12/376-majorities-feel-government
RACookPE (06:29:14) :
“Global warming ELECTED the current US administration – and Pelosi’s domination of the US House of Representatives in the election right before – in Nov 2006.
Global warming is pushed and propagandized BY the socialist media FOR the socialist agenda for the benefit of the international socialist government agencies (taxes and carbon “trading” and direct handouts to the corrupt 3rg world and 4th world dictatorships. Non-government agencies (all with a “nice-sounding” “feel-good” agenda) plus their self-centered fund-me-fund-me I’m helping people agenda are likewise benefiting from the AGW propaganda and the attack-the-western-world/attack-the-US behind the AGW propaganda.
I said above the Obama administration was elected by global warming: My logic follows.
Pelosi used her power in the House to restrict oil production, off-shore drilling, Alaskan pipelines, and pushed heavily the “alternate-but-more-expensive” fuels agenda dreamed of by the AGW eco-theists. That combined effort – starting in spring 2007 when her power over legislation started – began driving up fuel prices from their long-term steady, slowly increasing rate to the tremendous highs of January-February 2008. Right when the primary season for presidential politics began. As fuel price rose, the economy tanked, as it always has since the early 70’s.
Drops in employment, auto, trade, steel, crops, and everything else shipped or produced immediately followed – and the current recession began. THAT recession fueled the housing and mortgage crisis’s that collapsed Wall Street and the banks in early September and October – just in time for the democrats “first (failed) economic support packages . Cleverly, they (the democrat) can properly blame these early fight-the-recession policies (and their budget-busting inflationary numbers) on Bush, which also turned off conservatives from voting for McCain and protects liberal democrats from criticism. The smiles on the democrat faces as they got their first stimulus package in Sept 2008 tell it all: their strategy was complete. The republicans were defeated in Sept, and merely had to use the media to hold off rallies until the November votes were counted.
Did she (Pelosi and her cohorts) really want the economy to stay as bad as it has, for as long as it has?
Some do. They intensely hate capitism, and want all capitalism system, msm (particularly the US) to fail. Others probably do not, but cannot fight the extremists, or the inertia that is still slowing economy.
Note that oil prices dropped immediately when the artificial research limit and developments expired on October 1, 2008, and have stayed low since then, but by Oct 1, the damage had been done.”
You make an interesting point and it just illustrates the grand strategy the socialist movement have put into this. In fact it’s all looking very soviet with the Copenhagen treaty coming next month.
This is all about the frequencies of record highs and lows but aren’t the magnitudes of the records also of interest? What if the record lows are on average more extreme (for whatever reason) than the records highs?
The picture of the old stereo ”balance control” at the start of this post (I used to have one) should have been turned to the maximum hard-left ”5” position.
With respect to the concluding line by Pielke Sr.; i.e.:
”The news community clearly has a bias in its reporting.”
No kidding. . . . Of course we are all shocked. . . SHOCKED; to see yet another clear example of MSM bias.
All I can say is thank goodness for sites like WUWT, ICECAP, SPPI, etc.
And like someone else said:
I think the ”big mo” is starting to turn. The still very worrisome question is whether the turn will be large enough and quick enough to blunt and finally stop the AGW zealots before major long-term damage is done to our economy; that even best case would take a long time to reverse.
Some time ago the Australian rural programme Landline,to its credit, put some balance into reporting water in our major river The Murray. This is what it looked like in 1914 http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/Dry%20Murray%201914%20blog.JPG
This section of the river today is flowing.
If you look at Google Images on the Murray you can pick and choose an image to suit your own bias.
People and some in the media are beginning to question. They have reason to question, and that reason is the bizzare and often totally out-of-place claims of warming when people know better. Don’t sell the young short. They may not have been schooled in how to think, but they can figure things out for themselves. All they need is a reason to start looking. AGW (aka Climate Change) is the single most insulting campaign agenda I have ever heard.
What? Did they think they can slide by with all-day-stupid reporting?
Of course the left, A Gore and co know for sure the CO2 story is just that otherwise they would be insisting we buy nothing made in China Brazil or any of the “dirty” developing countries. No it is better to assassinate industry in the developed west and have the goods made in uncontrolled factories, then it gives the socialists control of all of us.
MSM = Meretricious Sycophantic Media. If you don’t have your dictionary handy, a meretrix is a cheap whore and a sycophant is a suck-up.
interesting way to respond to a study: assert “media bias” without ever engaging with the study on its merits.
Also note that neither of the land use studies cited here is “skeptical” of the idea that CO2 is causing global warming:
“While the effects of greenhouses gases like carbon dioxide are clear, Kalnay said, the study does suggest land use needs to be considered carefully as well.
“‘I think that greenhouse warming is incredibly important, but land use should not be neglected,’ she said. ‘It contributes to warming, especially in urban and desertic areas.'”
In any case, if land use is contributing to climate change, that’s an argument for more government regulation, not an argument against cap-and-trade.
Also, note this sentence:
“The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”
So if you DO believe this study is skeptical of AGW theory, it would disprove the notion that government funding somehow biases climate change research in one direction.