A story in Sunday’s New York Times continues the paper’s tradition of treating man-made climate change (supposedly caused by CO2 emissions) as settled scientific fact — instead of hysteria generated by the left.
The Times could barely contain its glee in reporting that despite the fact that the Kyoto Protocol has been in limbo for more than a decade (and even those countries that signed it have failed to meet their targets in cutting carbon-emissions), “President Obama has radically shifted the global equation, placing the United States at the forefront of the international climate effort and raising hopes that an effective international accord might be possible.”
As evidence of this radical redirection of U.S. energy policy, the paper cited Secretary of State Hillary Clinton making climate change the central focus of her recent visit to China.
The Times also reported, “A good first step, environmentalists say, would be to commit to trying to limit [global] warming to two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial temperatures …”
This advocacy is based on the supposition that humans can actually affect the Earth’s temperature.
Testifying before a U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on February 25, Dr. William Harper, a Princeton professor and former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy, maintained that the rise of CO2 emissions has little, if anything, to do with climate change.
Dr. Harper noted that the present warming period started around 1800, at the end of the last little ice age (predating the widespread use of fossil fuels by at least 100 years), and ended 10 years ago. He also testified that the Medieval Warming period (800-1300 AD) was as warm as or warmer than today. (Were fossil-fuel burning factories pumping CO2 into the atmosphere during the Dark Ages?) Harper told the Committee there were multiple warming and cooling periods over the past 10,000 years, which — not coincidentally — coincided with cycles of solar activity.
There’s nothing scientific about The Times’ reporting on energy and global warming, which treats a hotly disputed theory as an indisputable fact.
@nytimes.com
