Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse railed against the Wall Street Journal editorial page for denying the science behind global warming.
“It is a paragon in journalism … until you turn to the editorial page, and then you step into a chasm of polluter sludge when the issue is harmful industrial pollutants,” Whitehouse said in a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday. “When that is the issue, harmful industrial pollutants, this editorial page will mislead its readers, will deny the scientific consensus, it will ignore its excellent news pages’ actual reporting, all to help the industry; to help the campaign to manufacture doubt and delay action.”
Whitehouse then goes on to point out how the Journal’s editorial page has covered issues, allegedly espousing industry talking points to stymie regulations rather than reporting the facts. The senator cited a report by the liberal site Media Matters and showing a “Denier’s Playbook” about how the Journal has been allegedly denying science throughout the decades.
“Well, we have the right to expect independent and honest media to teach the American public about the threats facing our oceans and our environment,” Whitehouse said. “The story of climate change needs to be told. Our oceans need a voice. It seems the big polluters already have one.”
Whitehouse and other liberals have become increasingly frustrated as the media takes a more skeptical view of global warming given data showing that the planet has not warmed since 1998.
Media Matters reports that “many mainstream media outlets amplified the marginal viewpoints of those who doubt the role of human activity in warming the planet, even though the report itself reflects that the climate science community is more certain than ever that humans are the major driver of climate change.”
Earlier this year, the Economist and the BBC reported that there has been a lull in global warming for the last 15 years.
The Economist reported in May that “temperatures have not really risen over the past ten years” and that “[o]ver the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat.”
“Since 1998, there has been an unexplained ‘standstill’ in the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere,” BBC News reported the same month.
Furthermore, climate scientists have become increasingly focused not on warming, but on the slight cooling trend since 2002.
“Attention in the public debate seems to be moving away from the 15-17 year ‘pause’ to the cooling since 2002,” writes Dr. Judith Curry, the chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology — who was classified as a global warming doubter” by Media Matters.
However, Curry is not alone. International scientists have been looking at sunspot activity for insights into long term climate trends. They have found that sunspot activity has been decreasing at its fastest rate in 10,000 years, suggesting that the world could be in a cooling trend.
“After the maximum of solar cycle 24, from approximately 2014 we can expect the start of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age in 2055,” wrote Habibullo Abdussamatov of the Russian Academy of Science.
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