Journalism’s Contribution to the Rise of Climate Alarm

Guest Opinion by H. Sterling Burnett

As respect for journalists and their trustworthiness declines, mainstream media outlets, both print and television, are losing readers, subscribers, and viewers. By any measure, journalists aren’t trusted. In public opinion polls, the only professions consistently falling below journalists on their trustworthiness or ethical standards are politicians and used-car salespeople.

This doesn’t surprise me. For more than 20 years I’ve watched supposedly respected media outlets, with investigative journalists on staff, fail to accurately portray the debate surrounding claims human fossil fuel use is causing catastrophic climate change.

Journalism, until recently revered as the “fourth estate,” is supposed to promote objectivity and facts, with its practitioners serving as watchdogs against government corruption and malfeasance and big moneyed interests who collude with bureaucrats and politicians against the average Joe. Yet on the issue of climate change, the mainstream media long ago abandoned objectivity and their role as watchdog in favor being cheerleaders and promoters of conspiracy theories and ever more powerful, intrusive government.

Mainstream media outlets uncritically parrot and hype the most alarming claims and extreme scenarios, however unlikely, made in every report governments issue saying human-caused “climate extremes” are an “existential threat to humanity.” They report the claims as if they were revealed truths, given to them from on high. Foregoing journalism’s fundamental responsibility—similar to the responsibility scientists have—to question everything, to start from a position of skepticism and investigate the source of the claims, the assumptions built into them, whether they are supported by actual data, and whether other data contradicts them, the media instead proclaims, “Science has spoken. Humans are destroying the earth.”

There is no consensus that catastrophic climate change is happening and humans are causing it. Yet, due to lazy or biased reporters and editors not seeking out contrasting views or voices, and publishers and broadcasters not requiring their operations to maintain standards of fairness and veracity, the mainstream media uncritically presents a climate crisis as settled fact, as certain as that the world is round.

Read the full article at the following weblink:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/12/journalisms-contribution-to-...

Groupthink

The late Professor Irving Janis analysed what happens when people get caught up in what he termed ‘groupthink’, a pattern of collective psychological behaviour with three distinctive features, that we can characterise as rules.

“• A group of people come to share a particular view or belief without a proper appraisal of the evidence.

“• This leads them to insist that their belief is shared by a ‘consensus’ of all rightminded opinion.

“• Because their belief is ultimately only subjective, resting on shaky foundations, they then defend it only by displaying an irrational, dismissive hostility towards anyone daring to question it.

“This paper begins by showing how strongly all these three symptoms were in evidence, right from the start, when, in the late 1980s, the belief that a rise in carbon dioxide levels was causing the earth dangerously to warm was first brought to the world’s attention.

“It shows how the rules of groupthink continued to be in evidence when, during the period around the first report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990 and the Rio ‘Earth Summit’ of 1992, global warming became adopted as an international scientific and political ‘consensus’.

“The presence of groupthink was confirmed at Kyoto in 1997, when practical steps were first agreed to slow down the rise in world temperatures, by means that would require the richer, developed nations of the West to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions, while allowing the still ‘developing’ nations, such as China and India, to continue increasing them until their economies had caught up with the West. Eventually, as the paper will show, this division between the West and the rest of the world would turn out to be the crux of the whole story,”

After discussion of the 1998 El Niño Booker continues:

“But then came the ‘hockey stick’ controversy, which first drew charges that, to make their case seem more plausible, supporters of the ‘consensus’ – strongly endorsed by the IPCC – were having to manipulate crucial scientific evidence. Their response to these allegations was further evidence of Janis’s third rule, that any attempt to challenge the ‘consensus’ must be ignored, rejected and suppressed.” [Boldface added]

Booker has many useful observations in his 100-page paper.

TWTW has termed groupthink, adopted by government entities supposedly producing objective science, as Bureaucratic Science. The consequences of Groupthink can be malevolent, evidenced by the adoption of the UK’s Climate Change Act 2008, prompted by distorted science and statistics; the UN’s declaration of the eminent extinction of one million species, prompting children to declare the Extinction Rebellion; or the recent announcement by Prince Charles that “We have 18 months to save world.”

As can be seen in the above Quote of the Week, groupthink gives an opportunity for those who wish to change the world without requiring serious thought of the consequences.

Read the full article at the following weblink:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/15/weekly-climate-and-energy-ne...

Carbon-Free Power: Solar versus Nuclear

By Wallace Manheimer

There are two possible sources of carbon-free power available today: solar power and nuclear power. Solar power includes solar photovoltaic (converting sunlight directly into electrical power) and solar thermal (heating a fluid with sunlight and converting the heat to electricity). Solar power has received hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and research grants in the United States alone, and perhaps as much as a trillion worldwide over the past 30 years. For that investment, solar contributes roughly 1% of the world's total power.

So which is better, solar or nuclear? While it is impossible to provide a definitive answer now, there is a gigantic laboratory in Europe that gives a strong indication. That laboratory is France and Germany. For years, France has embraced nuclear power, and currently, it gets about 75–80% of its electric power from its 58 nuclear reactors. Germany has embraced an "energiewende," or energy transformation. It intends to get as much power as possible from solar, while disassembling its nuclear infrastructure. Currently, it is getting 25–30% from solar.

Let's compare France and Germany on price for electricity and emission of CO2 into the atmosphere. Despite massive German subsidies, the price for power in Germany is rising fast, and it is approaching about 40 cents per kilowatt-hour. In France, the price is less than half of this (in the United States, less than a third). Yet this is for solar producing less than a third of German electric power, whereas nuclear produces nearly all of the electric power in France.

Read the full article at the following weblink:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/carbonfree_power_s...