Guest Essay by Kip Hansen
If the year were 1965 AND this were the Soviet Union AND he was writing in Pravda AND CAGW was required Party Line THEN I would understand Justin Gillis’ latest piece in the New York Times.
Justin Gillis, New York Times’ Environmental journalist, has been at it again attempting to shore up the Great Global Warming cause in his latest “opinion column” somehow erroneously placed in the Science News section of the International New York Times online at:
I’d like to really lay into Mr. Gillis for this bit of party-line propaganda, but he says so little that it would be difficult to do so.
He correctly points out that one cold winter does not mean that the world has not warmed up since the Little Ice Age — which is mostly what all those graphs that the NY Times used to put in Mr. Gillis’ articles about Global Warming would show, rising temperatures since 1850 or so. Neither Mr. Gillis nor the NY Times’ editors ever seemed inclined to mark the graphs showing the period from about 1975-2000 as being the part in which the IPCC believes the AGW signal began to be seen.
All readers here know why Justin Gillis no longer includes global temperature graphs in his articles. They tell a different story than his words — the world is a little warmer than it was during the Little Ice Age – thank God or your Lucky Stars — opinions vary – but not quite as warm as the Medieval Warm Period.
He points out as well that Alaska, which most people think of as the cold part of America, has been warmer lately, and that California – the state of my birth and childhood — has been having yet another drought — those in my lifetime alone being 1958-59, 1961, 1977, 1986-91, 2001-02, 2006-07.
Here’s Mr. Gillis’ winning hard-science punch line:
“Though the case is as yet unproven, a handful of scientists think the 50-degree temperatures in London and the frigid weather in Minneapolis might be a consequence of climate change.”
Wait for it now…it gets better:
“Fortunately, we are not stuck with human perception alone. Nowadays we have sophisticated thermometers scattered all over the place. On land, aboard boats, attached to satellites, floating in the ocean — wherever we put them, they are telling us a pretty consistent story.
No matter how cold it got in Wisconsin last week, the world really is warming up.”
I’m sorry, but I’ve just got to wonder who he thinks pops out and reads the thermometers “attached to satellites” and what temperature readings they get out there in space. Maybe Josh could do a cartoon of Gillis checking one for us.
The link on “warming up” goes to the three-year out-of-date — up to 2011– BEST Results paper (published in the very first issue of the journal GIGS: An Overview). You have to be pretty sharp to see it, with the way the material is presented, but, of course, the paper confirms the then-so-far 14-year hiatus in Global Warming.
The main point is: Why is Justin Gillis writing such an article in the NY Times? There is no news in it. His concluding sentence is blatantly incorrect. It contains little journalistic effort, other than finding some scientist that will say something warmish without mentioning the hiatus or the pause. He couldn’t mention the IPCC because they have admitted the pause and can’t explain it, yet he presses on in spite of them. The NY Times editors have been fairly calm on the CAGW issue lately, so it is unlikely they are pressuring him to write such tripe, in fact, they recently closed the Environmental Desk altogether. The NY Times is one of the world’s “newspapers of record” and should be above this sort of sloppiness.
[If there are any secret sympathizers on staff at the Times, weigh in in the comments. The moderators here at WUWT know how to reach me privately, I am intensely curious as to why and how such a piece could be published.]
MODERATION NOTE: I will reply to appropriate comments on journalism, the NY Times, propaganda and its uses in modern society, and the sloppy weather we are having in Florida this week.
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I have a near-thirty year journalism career behind me, and my question for the NYT would be “Why would you employ an ‘environment reporter’ who betrays such a woeful lack of expertise in the environmental sciences?” Be that as it may, these types of full-throated, propaganda-filled opinion pieces will continue apace, but I console myself with the notion that the audience for them is steadily dwindling. Turns out, we media consumers don’t like having our intelligence insulted. Thanks to the internet and blogs such as this, the audience has now gained far more expertise in ‘the environment’ than the reporters assigned to cover it.
That Anchorage was having a extreme heat wave while much of the U.S. froze was a big deal in media reports. That temps at Anchorage Int’l Airport are now ranging from 2 to 13 degrees F is not.
“Why would you employ an ‘environment reporter’ who betrays such a woeful lack of expertise in the environmental sciences?”
Evolution? Mankind has evolved to a level of purposeful, selective & optional morality whereby an agenda itself becomes the overriding belief system which compels random adjustments without the constraint of judgement.
Under this modern man 2.0 a mission can be predicated upon an entirely fictitious and limitless array of notions and causes unrelated to achieving any objective at all.
It’s chaos of the preposterous falsely presented as calculated and designed.
Haphazard and disheveled yet certain, driven and emboldened by authoritative decree and regulatory tyranny.
Or….It could also be the implementation of a plot to take over a species.
Sort of an invasion of body snatchers scenario. Infect the bulks of academia and governments with a destabilizing parasite of wholesale deceit and retardation of analysis causing mass disruption of intellect and governance. Rendering the populations incapable of addressing the needs of the species.
I live where there is abundant evidence of either possibility and it is getting worse every day.
Eeeek! Has become my favorite expression. 🙂
Is there something going horribly wrong and without any possibility of remedy?
That’s a bit too doomsday to believe.
.
Are we simply being slowly suffocated under intensifying swarm of unanswerable questions?
And who are really asking? Our browsers.
Please snip me?
When I grew up in a Communist country, a joke was that there were three kinds of news:
– True ones: sports results
– Probable ones: a weather forecast
– and all the rest.
NYT is getting there.
Here in Glen Rock PA., I have just cleared 14 inches of Global Warming/Climate Change from my driveway. And as I look at the radar maps on the T.V., I see the ice and snow storm hammering the East Coast from Georgia to Maine. Meanwhile, the AGW proponents are becoming more strident in their claims that this is all because of man made Global Warming/Climate Change. My guess is they believe if they say it loud enough and often enough it will be perceived as true. unfortunately for them, most of us know the only climate man can change is the climate enclosed in the structures he builds.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
Pity the image used in the article isn’t Niagara Falls 2014.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/natural/niagarafalls.asp
‘I’m sorry, but I’ve just got to wonder who he thinks pops out and reads the thermometers “attached to satellites” and what temperature readings they get out there in space.’
Maybe it’ll be Leonardo DiCaprio when he takes his first ride aboard Virgin Galactic (paid for, of course, by a veritable ocean tanker full of carbon credits or, more likely, through good intentions on that $80,000 thrill ride).
“I understand that people are scared of math, but it should be required training for all science reporters (and editors). Otherwise they simply aren’t qualified to report.”
Hear, hear!
Ah yes, the New York Times…
Wasn’t that the paper that Jayson Blair used to write for?
Doesn’t seem to have improved much.
Satellites have been measuring their temperatures for quite some time, but the data is usually not of much interest other than to maintenance staff. Sputnik I was broadcasting its internal and external temperature.
Excerpts from a story by:
By JILL LAWLESS and SETH BORENSTEIN
Associated Press
“LONDON (AP) – Britain’s weather service says it sees the tentacles of climate change in a spate of storms and floods battering the country, but has stopped short of saying that global warming directly caused the extreme conditions.”
—
Britain’s Met Office, the nation’s weather agency, said in a paper published this week that “there is no definitive answer” on the role played by climate change in the recent weather and floods. But it said there is “an increasing body of evidence that extreme daily rainfall rates are becoming more intense,” probably due to a warming world.
==========
I don’t have a direct line to the AP newswires, I found the above here:
http://www.kfvs12.com/story/24701398/storm-with-106-mph-gusts-hits-flooded-britain
The two newspapers I have delivered, had short excerpts of the story.
They both mentioned the uncertainties.
RichardLH says:
February 13, 2014 at 2:54 am
“Though the case is as yet unproven, a handful of scientists think the 50-degree temperatures in London and the frigid weather in Minneapolis might be a consequence of climate change.”
——————————————————————————————————————-
I just took a look at MeteoFrance24 weather page, London is a little above average for this month. Then I clicked on Dublin and was surprised to see that Dublin is below average for this time of year. Obviously global warming does not strike everywhere at once. Glasgow is also below average at this time and for the rest of this week, per the forecast. Amsterdam is above average, as is all of Northern Europe and the Scandinavian nations.
The Arctic map clearly shows that from Iceland through into Europe is above average at this time. However, take a look at what the rest of the northern latitudes are experiencing…http://www.weather-forecast.com/maps/Arctic?symbols=none&type=lapse
More Replies ==>
heysuess ==> In our years of humanitarian service in the Dominican Republic, we had many friends with the same name. Mr. Gillis was, at one time, a hard-hitting, articulate environmental journalist. John Tierney used to be his counterweight in the Science section, a bit to the right. Now Gillis seems to have lost it altogether. That’s what I am trying to explain. I have tried to engage Andrew Revkin in a conversation but believe he is constrained by collegial loyalty — and takes the high road of remaining mum.
nutso fasst ==> Is this “vox populi” — on the spot reporting from Alaska?
Steve Oregon ==> Ah, a choice phrase “chaos of the preposterous” — precisely, I’m afraid. I would be careful with the phrase “Please snip me.” — way to dependent on context.
Curious George ==> I think we got “all the rest” from Mr. Gillis yesterday. Another commenter (tmtisfree) gave us the venerable, late Michael Crichton quote, always worth repeating:
“When distinguished institutions like the New York Times can no longer differentiate between factual content and editorial opinion, but rather mix both freely on their front page, then who will hold anyone to a higher standard?”
Large parts of Canada and Europe have bizzarely warm temperatures? Huh?bizzarely? Being in Canada I would have heard this in the lamestream media. They have been reporting how utterly bitter cold it has been across the country. And is -10 C in Alask that unreasonably warm?
Im in BC where it did get record cold breaks but now back to seasonal 7-10 C , In my 47 years I have not ever said you know something is different about the weather. I remember on Christmas day in 1988 or so, it being warm enough to drive my convertible with the top down. But it was a one-off. Hasnt happened since. I wish it would. Good thing I brought my windmill palms indoors this year, I almost didnt.
@Kip Hansen: What part of Florida? I’m in Palm Beach County, more specifically Lake Worth.
(I am Andrew, by the way)
@Gail Combs –
Alas, you suffer the curse of being devoted to facts. Shame on you. /sarc
The intelligentsia vanguard at the NYT leading us to a dictatorship by elites and fellow travelers based on “science.”
That’s so 20th century. Alles klar, Herr Kommissar?
Lichanos says:
I think the Times is a fine paper, but their journalism on this topic is very poor.
As it has been in a number of other cases, which leads me to wonder why anyone would think it’s a ‘fine paper’.
The gradual growth of the internet, blogs and access to them, has revealed starkly a thing many of us had observed personally but not considered sensible to extrapolate forward.
The media people are rushed and lazy, having been involved in certain events, I was appalled by the divergence of the news coverage.
As year passed and the internet grew, I noticed the laziness of coverage and a word for word sameness of coverage regardless of medium.The rest of the story found only on the net.
The CAGW meme is propaganda.
The old media has been behaving as they always have, we viewers/readers have changed.
Having caught the institutional misinformation, it is no longer possible to trust.
That they will lie to support their cause is not in dispute.
We who were trained to trust authority are the battlefield.
The man,Gillis has not changed, he still does what he always has, but the wish to believe falters when contradicted by the evidence of our eyes, pocketbooks and physical senses.
@TonyG
…which leads me to wonder why anyone would think it’s a ‘fine paper’
Well, I can cite many instances where I thought their reporting and editorial stance was bad, but with most other papers, I could cite vastly more. A “perfect” paper with which I always agree doesn’t agree, and wouldn’t be much good anyway.
If it’s “climate change” it must be an impending catastrophe! We know the climate never changes naturally, right?
Kip Hansen: “vox populi?” No, NWS:
http://pafc.arh.noaa.gov/index.php
Justin Gillis, please tell us again about “the Bigger Picture”
If you don’t like what is in the picture or the graphs, you can always look at the “Bigger Picture”, but it will not change the facts which we are slowly beginning to see.
Humans
all intents and purposes
Yes, the concept of weather being the result of change in the average run of weather (as opposed to a component or data point) is a problem. A change in climate would require some alteration of the workings of the planetary forces that balance each other. CO2 is too feeb to achieve much in that regard, and even has credentials as a cooling agent (see Jinan Cao). The Chinese are very pleased with its effects on their arid regions.
Delingpole now has gone to work inside the establishment, DECC no less. Lets see if he gives them a stomach-ache.