June 24, 2014

On some issues the media intelligentsia resembles a mad dog fighting demons with a bone clenched in its irrational jaw.  Lately the list of targets is getting longer: discrediting New Jersey’s Governor Christie for personally creating a delay at the George Washington bridge, castigating the Koch brothers for daring to think government is over-reaching, redistributing the wealth to poor homeless folks, and, most notably – blaming man for despoiling the climate and predicting apocalyptic floods and droughts within the next ten years if we fail to tax hydrocarbons.  Such politically motivated journalism would be laughable if not for the large number of otherwise rational thinkers who read “All the News that’s fit to print” and believe the drivel as they would a sermon from the Mount.

I’m on this rant because of two articles appearing today in the NY Times.  In the first section we find, “Bipartisan Report Tallies High Toll on Economy From Global Warming”.  On the first page of the Science section we find, “A Sunken Kingdom Re-emerges”.

The lede in the first article:

“More than a million homes and businesses along the nation’s coasts could flood repeatedly before ultimately being destroyed. Entire states in the Southeast and the Corn Belt may lose much of their agriculture as farming shifts northward in a warming world. Heat and humidity will probably grow so intense that spending time outside will be dangerous, throwing industries like construction and tourism into turmoil.”  (Underlining is mine.)

What absolute hyperbole!  And who are the ‘experts’ who bring us this dire prediction? None other than Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin – two economists who couldn’t even predict interest rates one week in advance of the greatest economic disaster in modern history (a man-made disaster, precipitated by them, in their so called area of expertise). Now we are asked to believe they are competent observers and predictors of nature.  Give me a break! That’s Al Gore’s job.

If all this is not crazy enough, they call their report ‘Risky Business’.  I’ll bet even Tom Cruise is laughing at that one.  If memory serves me, that film was shot in Chicago, now home to Henry Paulson.  Maybe we need another shooting in the windy city.

Perhaps the Times’  Mr. Sulzberger should have fired himself instead of his Managing Editor. The charge would be ‘fraudulently representing opinionated beliefs as news’.

The story from the Science Section is a factual account of recent discoveries by British archaeologists off the British coast near the town of Borth which was hammered by storms in mid-2013.  The sea swallowed large swaths of the coastline and spit it out again leaving homes and businesses destroyed but uncovering a treasure trove of prehistoric trees and fossilized animal and human skeletons. Dr. Nicholas Ashton, a curator at the British museum, said: “… what the sea reveals, it tends to reclaim almost as soon.”  He went on to say: “The big lesson is, we have to adapt. Whether we like it or not, the  climate will change – it always has – and always will.”  He described what the area would have looked like 20,000 years ago with dry land stretching across the North Sea. “You could have walked from Denmark to Yorkshire in those days,” he said. I’d wager man had nothing to do with melting that bridge across the sea.

Perhaps if Beowulf or Thor (or whatever god was employed back then) had raised taxes on the cave dwellers we’d still be able to hike to Denmark from England.  Good luck with that.

The NY Times’ unintended juxtaposition of blatantly biased reporting compared to actual scientific facts, uncovered by ‘real experts’, is revealing to say the least.

You are welcome.

jpylewmg@gmail.com