By Chris Wright, 9/30/22
Major media outlets are all aflutter blaming climate change for Hurricane Ian. But the real hurricane is bought-and-paid-for so-called ‘climate journalism’ producing a vortex of fake climate change stories.
CNN commentator Don Lemon kept pestering NOAA’s hurricane director about the effect of climate change on Ian. “These storms are intensifying,” Lemon claimed. The exasperated director finally said, “I don’t think you can link climate change to any one event…. climate change may be making storms worse. But to link it to any one event, I would caution against that.”
If you tuned into NPR last night, you would have heard the claim hurricanes are intensifying because of – “wait for it,” the announcer said – climate change, the Gulf of Mexico has gotten warmer. Sounds plausible, but there’s just one problem: there’s no correlation. A Ph.D. meteorologist “examined all of the major hurricane … strikes in Texas since 1870 and plotted them as red dots on the time series of sea surface temperature variations over the western Gulf of Mexico. As can be seen, major hurricanes don’t really care whether the Gulf is above average or below average in temperature.” Hey, but it sounds good, right?
What is producing this intensifying storm of climate change stories and fear-mongering? At least three huge efforts to drive ‘climate change journalism’ have launched in recent months.
The first is Covering Climate Now, a collaboration of Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation magazine. It has 400 media partners reaching 2 billion people. It supports partners with, among other things, story ideas, editorial content and consultation, webinars, collaborative coverage, and promotion when partners run a climate story. So they’ll give the media outlet the story, instruct the outlet on how to tell it, and gin up the left-wing media echo chamber when the lap dog jumps through the hoop. Guess who are partners – NPR stations and NPR’s Here & Now program. Imagine that. Guess who won one of their awards for climate coverage – CNN. Imagine that. Who’s paying for all this? The Rockefeller Family Fund and other left-wing organizations, that’s who.
Left-wing funders are also behind climate coverage at another major outlet, the Associated Press, which is also pushing the narrative that climate change is making Ian worse. AP received $8 million from various left-wing funders to hire more eco-journalists. Eight million dollars will buy a lot of yapping from the 20 reporters AP has hired for its new climate reporting hub. The money puts AP in a financial conflict of interest, so do not look to AP for unbiased coverage of so-called climate change, because climate change advocacy is where AP’s bread is now buttered.
Finally, the committed left-wing activist Barbara Streisand funded a new Center for the Impact of Climate Change at UCLA to ‘speak truth to power and save the planet’.
So don’t ask me to take seriously any of the media outlets receiving guidance and funding from left-wing activists for climate change coverage. I just can’t, not when I know these media outlets are bought and paid for, hired guns who will say anything to keep the money flowing at a time when journalism is in financial distress. Media outlets now take funding from the communist Chinese and all sorts of other dodgy sources, to keep the gravy train running. You can add climate change fanatics to the list of their funders. Ca-ching, ca-ching.
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