Scary stories

This past week — as delegates from 182 countries circled and plotted in Bonn about how to avoid the great upcoming Copenhagen Climate Policy Collapse — there appeared the usual bumper crop of stories that either regurgitated climate alarmism, positively promoted it, or otherwise carried the banner for pointless policy upheaval.

Despite Al Gore’s claims of too much denialism in the press, the mainstream media has been almost entirely captured by his alleged “Inconvenient Truth.” The skeptical voices that have always been essential to science — and freedom — have been marginalized and ridiculed, and nonsense walks proudly on stilts.

Typical was widespread and unquestioning coverage of a report this week from the UN claiming that climate change was killing more than 300,000 people a year. The report’s figures were found to have been entirely manufactured, but that revelation received virtually no coverage... [snip]

One event that received virtually zero coverage in the mainstream media this week was the Heartland Institute’s Third Annual International Conference on Climate Change, which took place in Washington.

That was perhaps because the conference presented climate scientists and economists who refuted fashionable alarmism and subjected the Waxman-Markey bill — which seeks to impose a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide emissions — to withering analysis, concluding that it would destroy jobs, raise prices and do nothing for the climate.

At the conference, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels suggested that the success of alarmism had a lot to do with the absence of fact-checking in the media. But while that may be true, it seems as much due to the fact that many in the media regard themselves as eco-warriors.

As such, they never let the facts stand in the way of a good, scary environmental story...

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