“2014 Breaks Heat Record, Challenging Global Warming Skeptics” needled The New York Times A1 headline Saturday, January 17 in an editorial polemic disguised as a news story. One can only imagine the headline if the Green Church mouthpiece Times had been printing at the time of Galileo:
“Church Demonstrates Sun Revolves Around Earth, Challenging Aristotelian Model.”
Times’ coverage of global warming long ago threw science under the bus and its news stories have been particularly shrill even by left-wing industry standards. The Saturday diatribe is notable for its attempt to blackball global warming heretics.
“Last year was the hottest on earth since recordkeeping began in 1880 . . . undermining claims by climate change contrarians that global warming had somehow stopped,” wrote reporter Justin Gillis in his lead. “Skeptics of climate change have long argued that global warming stopped around 1998.”
The fact that global temperatures have stalled for nearly two decades might be news to Times readers since it has ignored that inconvenient truth (“All the news that fits,” should read The Times masthead). No, that factoid is only useful in order to dismiss heretics like John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville who dismisses Gillis’ premise that 2014 was a particularly warm year.
“Despite such arguments from a handful of scientists,” continues The Times, “the vast majority of those who study the climate say the earth is in a long-term warming trend that is profoundly threatening and caused almost entirely by human activity.”
That “vast majority” only exists in the mind of Al Gore and Times writers. Opinion polls have consistently shown scientists uncertain about the science. Indeed, if there is a consensus, it’s that proposed treaties to cap greenhouse gases would have little effect on temperatures.
What experts does Gillis cite for his claim of looming Armageddon? None other than Michael Mann, the discredited Penn State climatologist at the Center of Climategate. If Climategate is the modern Inquisition to discredit Green Church heretics, then it is Mann who (along with East Anglia’s Phil Jones) played the role of Chief Inquisitor Father Firenzuola.
“It is exceptionally unlikely that we would be witnessing a record (period of warmth) . . . were it not for the rising levels of planetwarming gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels,” Mann told The Times.
The Inquisition rests.