Climate Change Weekly #521: Climate Journalism, Increasingly Bought and Paid For

By H. Sterling Burnett

IN THIS ISSUE:

• Climate Journalism, Increasingly Bought and Paid For
• Biden/Harris Climate Agenda Serves China’s, Not U.S., Interests
• Water Vapor Increases Due to Direct Human Environmental Alterations, Not CO2 Feedback

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Climate Journalism, Increasingly Bought and Paid For

I have written a couple of times previously about the mainstream media’s outside-funded collaboration to promote climate alarm. For example, the Associated Press took millions of dollars from left-wing foundations specifically to cover climate change.

Journalistic creed and ethics be damned, media outlets collaborated to suppress voices of dissent, first about climate change, then about the Wuhan coronavirus and the government’s response to it, election integrity, and a variety of other left-leaning issues—through it all squashing free speech and the open discussion and debate of ideas and discoveries about climate change.

In 2013, the Los Angeles Times publicly announced it would no longer allow climate dissent on its pages. With that decision, the outlet shut down and shut out thousands of scientists and educated laypersons who, while accepting that the climate was changing (as it has repeatedly), questioned whether humans were the sole or primary cause and whether the change necessarily represented a crisis.

Almost simultaneously and in unison, mainstream media outlets stopped talking about global warming, proceeding to talk universally about climate change. More recently, at the behest of large environmental groups and activists within the federal government and the media itself, much of the media decided to shift from talking about climate change, which is too neutral—not necessarily conducive to generating fear and action—to asserting a “climate crisis” or “climate emergency.” So much for the pretense of objectively informing the public of the facts. What readers/listeners/viewers are supposed to think about climate is now baked into how it is described: an apocalyptic horror show; humans are killing the Earth with greenhouse gases. You know it’s true because the honest press says it’s so!

Then there is the payola: pay-for-publish coverage pushed by billionaires like Jeff Bezos and George Soros who buy off media outlets to promote the government/activist/leftist elite’s party line on climate change (and election integrity, or lack thereof), flooding their pages and programs with tales of climate woe. In the past, radio execs were paid to promote particular songs on the radio, to boost sales. When this was discovered, the payola scandal erupted. It was more than a scandal, however: it was a crime, banned by the Communications Act of 1934. But when billionaires and large foundations pay to promote very profitable climate scare stories, stories which we at Climate Realism have used real-world data to debunk in hundreds of posts, showing them to be flat-out false, there is a collective yawn and seeming acceptance of the media’s corruption and the climate disaster narrative they are spinning.

Popular social media outlets—supposedly neutral communication platforms, given a government grant of immunity from suits for libel and most other wrongdoing because they supposedly play no editorial role—have been shown to be putting their finger on the scales on a number of issues, working hand in hand with the government to deplatform, demonetize, and suppress, block, or “contextualize” people’s dissenting speech on climate change and other topics. Social media owned by elites push the elite party line, on which, working with government, they all profit: humans are causing a climate crisis, and no dissent is allowed.

With all of this as background, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn there are funded projects afoot to train journalists on how to cover climate change “the right way,” but I was. Thomas Gallatin describes the situation:

With the dire predictions of the climate change alarmists repeatedly failing to materialize, one would think that the media outlets would stop reporting such claims as if they were “scientific fact.”

One would think. Yet, as with so much of the climate alarmist industry, it’s all about the money. And since many of the leading climate cultists are also among the wealthiest folks on the planet, much of the mainstream media continues to pump out the propaganda.

Folks still aren’t buying the narrative, though, so these billionaire activists are doubling down. Last year, two of the leading climate cult groups, Solutions Journalism Network and Covering Climate Now, sponsored the creation of the Climate Blueprint for Media Transformation.

The Solutions Journalism Network is funded by the likes of the for-profit Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. These organizations are pumping their vast wealth to promote their climate change alarmism.

So, what is the Climate Blueprint? In a nutshell, it’s a 14-part guide that aims to turn journalists into climate activists by coaching them on how to cover climate change. The opening section, “The Everything Story,” calls on journalists to inject the climate alarmist narrative into everything they cover. From sports to economics to crime, climate change must be a front-and-center component. Maybe you’re thinking, It’s not already?

The guide also calls on reporters to demonize the fossil fuel industry—you know, the industry that allows their stories to be delivered to the public and keeps their lights and computers on and their delivery vehicles rolling. Also, reporters are told to criticize schools that don’t divest from fossil fuels, ignoring the fact that laws establishing fiduciary duties often prevent them from doing so.

In addition, the guide “guides” reporters concerning how to describe climate activists and the often disruptive and damaging actions they take. When it’s for the climate, “activists” aren’t rioters or terrorists or breaking the law; they are nonviolent protestors, and their actions, no matter how destructive, are “demonstrations.”

“Notice that none of this actually deals with scientific accuracy and truth-seeking,” says Gallatin, accurately. And since it has nothing to do with accuracy, truth-seeking, or producing an informed public, it also has nothing to do with legitimate journalism.

“Ultimately, for these billionaire activists, it’s about exerting greater control over society,” concludes Gallatin, a sentiment I couldn’t agree with more. It is always about power.

Sources: Patriot Post; Climate Change Weekly; Climate Realism

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Biden/Harris Climate Agenda Serves China’s, Not U.S., Interests

A year-long research project by The Heritage Foundation concludes the Chinese Communist Party is actively exploiting the climate change agenda to undermine U.S. energy independence and security by increasing America’s dependence on electric power technologies dominated by China, making the U.S. vulnerable to geopolitical extortion.

The project, under the rubric “Chinese Handcuffs,” comprises three reports, titled (in order of release): “In a War with China, America Would Need Robust Access to Conventional Fuels,” “How the Forced Energy Transition and Reliance on China Will Harm America,” and “Extricating America from Its Chinese Handcuffs.” As Heritage explains, the Chinese Handcuffs idea is symbolic of the fact that the restraints become tighter as one tries to extricate oneself or escape, in this case escaping the radical environmental agenda and its consequences.

Heritage explains that the Biden/Harris administration’s climate policies have accelerated America’s dependence on China, a fact one should expect China to exploit.

For instance, the second report details the extent to which the U.S. military is compromised by its reliance on critical minerals, materials, and technologies from China. Such dependence undermines our ability to project power and deter foes, especially China and its allies as they expand their geopolitical ambitions. In short, Biden’s and Harris’s climate policies compromise U.S. national security.

Concerning the rapid transition to “renewable” energy being foisted on the American people by the Biden/Harris administration, Heritage writes,

• The Biden-Harris renewable energy and electrification policies make America dependent on China, thereby handcuffing the U.S. to the Chinese Communist Party.
• The stated rationale for the dangerous policies is that fossil fuels are causing climate change and that their consumption must be forced to end.
• These policies weaken America, disproportionately hurt the poor, farmers, and small businesses, and should be a top priority for repeal by the next Administration.

The papers detail China’s control of critical minerals and metals and the technologies that use them, technologies at the heart of the green energy transition. Pick a green-energy technology, China has the control of it firmly in hand either directly or indirectly.

As described by writer Mike Miller, to remedy this dependence and secure America’s national security and economic improvement, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of Heritage’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, said, “We should be rolling back the mandates that require us to use the wind turbines, the solar panels, the electric vehicles, to rely on the electric batteries—because China makes all of these.”

“It dominates the world in all of these,” Furchtgott-Roth continued. “And why we are mandating these, this equipment that’s being produced by China, to me, is a mystery.”

Sources: Climate Change Dispatch; The Heritage Foundation

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Water Vapor Increases Due to Direct Human Environmental Alterations, Not CO2 Feedback

Despite all the news stories touting CO2 as the control knob for the climate, water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Most climate models assume a rise in CO2 causes a feedback loop, evaporating more water into the atmosphere and enhancing the warming effect.

Recent research confirms human activities are increasing atmospheric water vapor, at least regionally, but not because of the much-feared CO2-induced feedback loop.

A study published in Langmuir, a journal of the American Chemical Society, finds rather than water vapor increasing as a feedback response to CO2, further raising temperatures, as assumed in climate models, it turns out the human impact on water vapor is much more direct.

The authors of the study, from universities in China and Canada, find climate models fail to accurately depict regional changes in water vapor and the impacts on temperature. Utilizing humidity data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction and the National Center for Atmospheric Research reanalysis, the researchers found large discrepancies between the observed and the expected (climate model-projected) amounts of water vapor. They found “the absolute amount of water vapor increased substantially above the population centers and the agricultural areas in the Northern Hemisphere between 1960 and 2020. Human activities appear to have substantial impacts on the local water vapor content in the atmosphere.”

Note that the impact is not global but regional in nature and is more direct than as a result of a feedback response to rising concentrations of CO2. This research is confirmed by data showing agricultural regions and urban areas with artificially developed water resources are warming faster and are more humid than other locations than they were historically. The recent discussion of corn sweat is indicative of what this paper is discussing.

The paper goes on to posit that to improve our understanding of the climate system and its forcing factors and responses, and to improve how the system is modeled, one must incorporate an accurate understanding of the direct impact of human activities on water vapor and how that vapor is moved by weather patterns and large-scale air-circulation systems. This might explain, for example, “the observations that Arctic ice has been melting at a much more accelerated rate than Antarctic ice,” the researchers suggest.

H. Sterling Burnett

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.