The New York Times has taken a beating lately. Executive editor, Howell Raines, and managing editor, Gerald Boyd, were forced to resign because both kept their heads buried in the sand while Jason Blair churned out dozens of fictitious articles.
The head-in-the-sand syndrome must be endemic among the editors at the Times. Their June 20 editorial, “Censorship on Global Warming,” charges the Bush administration with “ostrichlike” behavior, because it will not allow Clinton bureaucrats – still in the EPA – to continue dishing out the U.N.’s hype and hysteria about global warming.
“Gone,” says the Times, “is any mention that the 1990’s are likely to have been the warmest decade in the last thousand years …,” a phrase often repeated by the Clinton administration.
Even if this statement were true, it would simply mean that global warming was more severe a thousand years ago than it was during the 1990s. It must have been caused by those whale-oil-guzzling lamps – it could not have been SUVs!
If the Times editors could get their heads out of the sand long enough to read the magnificent work of Dr. Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, they too could know that the global temperature was, indeed, substantially warmer during the 12th and 13th centuries than it was during the 20th century. Science calls the period the “Medieval Climate Optimum,” when “more than 50 vineyards,” thrived in England.
Then came the “Little Ice Age,” from about 1550 to 1700, when England, Europe and the northern hemisphere suffered famine and bitter cold – and no vineyards.
The first thermometer readings date back to 1659 in England. These readings reveal a slow, steady increase of .08 degrees C over a 300-year period – 200 years before the use of fossil fuel and the industrial revolution!
The Times editors apparently didn’t hear Dr. John Christy tell a congressional committee on May 28 that “the 19 hottest summers of the past 108 years occurred prior to 1955. In the Midwest, of the 10 worst heat waves, only two have occurred since 1970, and they placed 7th and 8th.” He also reported that “in the year 2000, in the 48 coterminous states, the U.S. experienced the coldest combined November and December in 106 years.”
John Christy is professor of atmospheric science, and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and is also Alabama’s State Climatologist and recently served as a lead author of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It is not the Bush administration that has its head in the sand. The Bush administration requires real science, and applies common sense, to the formulation of environmental policy. These qualities are absent from the extremists’ hype echoed by the New York Times.
Canada, too, is taking another look at the premature ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, a U.N. treaty that would give to an international body the power to control the use of fossil fuel. In a letter to Paul Martin, expected to be Canada’s next prime minister, 46 scientists and climate experts, said that the “Kyoto [Protocol] was not justified from a scientific perspective,” and that “Many climate science experts from Canada and around the world … strongly disagree with the scientific rationale for the Kyoto Accord.”
The New York Times, and environmental extremists, ignore the mounting evidence that human activity has little, if anything, to do with the cycles of climate change that have occurred since the beginning of time.
It is an irrefutable fact that there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than was present 100 years ago. Environmental extremists want carbon dioxide “controlled” as a pollutant, under the authority of the Clean Air Act. As Dr. Christy testified, and all scientists know, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant – it is as essential for plant life as oxygen is for human life.
A recent study by NASA and the Department of Energy revealed that in the last two decades, vegetation on the planet has expanded by 6 percent. Dr. Sherwood B. Idso, president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, in Tempe, Ariz., has specialized in measuring the effect of elevated carbon dioxide on plant growth. NASA’s findings simply confirm what his studies have shown for years.
The New York Times continues to destroy its credibility by “censoring” the work of scientists who poke holes in their global warming hype, while bashing Bush for recognizing – and acting on – the truth.
Network ‘news judgment’ depends on who benefits
Tim Graham