The Washington Post recently published an editorial attempting to discredit a recent speech I made on the U.S. Senate floor. I wanted to respond to the paper and set the record straight about why I gave the speech, so I submitted an op-ed and an alternative “Letter to the Editor” to the Washington Post.
The paper not only rejected my op-ed, but also rejected my letter to the editor because it did not fit within the parameters of debate that they set. This is not surprising. Much like Congressional Democrats’ recent efforts to chill the climate debate within the scientific community, the Washington Post, and many other entities in the mainstream media, are trying to control the climate debate in the public sphere. The paper had the liberty to respond to my floor statement with the points that they so desired, but did not give me the same opportunity in return.
I appreciate the Daily Caller for giving me a voice on this issue by publishing below my op-ed response I submitted to the Washington Post. The italicized portion is the material that I condensed for my second submission, which was a letter to the editor that was also rejected:
The Washington Post’s March 2 editorial proves my point: mainstream media consistently fails to report inconvenient facts that undermine climate hysteria. While mainstream media reports that 2014 was the warmest year on record, media fails to highlight that it was the “warmest year” by only 0.02 degrees Celsius. Furthermore, this NASA statistic has a standard margin of error of 0.1 degree Celsius, several times greater than the “record-breaking” amount of 0.02 degrees Celsius. At a press conference, NASA’s GISS Director even rescinded the ‘warmest year’ headline, saying that there was only a 38 percent chance that 2014 was actually the warmest year on record.
Another topic that the media loves to link to climate change is the incidence of extreme weather when the reality is that not only do we not know much about extreme weather events, but there is almost no scientific consensus on what causes it.
According to the National Hurricane Center, there has been no change in the intensity of land-falling hurricanes, and hurricane activity is at its lowest point since the 1970s. Additionally, the U.S. is currently experiencing the longest absence of severe landfall hurricanes in over a century. Even the EPA itself has said that “weather can vary widely, and extreme events occur naturally.”
What is most troubling is the benighted complacency with which the mainstream media makes the case for human-caused global warming, looking only at a century’s worth of data in the face of millennia natural climate cycles and a limited understanding of CO2 impacts.
The science is not settled. One of the foremost atmospheric scientists, Richard Lindzen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, totally rejects the concept saying that regulating carbon is a “bureaucrat’s dream,” because “if you control carbon, you control life.”
That’s what this is about. The president has already taken over the health care system, the financial system, and is now working to add our energy infrastructure to that list. The president has a long line of misusing administrative authority to achieve through regulatory fiat what he has not been able to achieve in Congress. He has to rely on unelected bureaucrats since the Senate has rejected the whole climate regulatory concept. When it comes to his climate regulations, these come with high costs and inconsequential benefits that will be rendered pointless by the emissions from China and India.
Climate scientists that are often referred to in the mainstream media receive a substantial amount of funding from federal grants or they are products of the IPCC. Let us not forget the IPCC was totally discredited in the Climategate scandal in 2009. The UK Telegraph called it, “The worst scientific scandal of our generation.”
As the Obama administration’s climate agenda continues to get more expensive and more oppressive for our economy, all in the name of a theory that is still being challenged, it’s no wonder the polls on global warming are shifting. What once used to be a high priority for Americans, global warming is 14 out of 15 national issues Americans are worried about according to a March 2014 Gallup poll.
According to a June 2014 Pew poll, 53 percent of Americans, when asked about the cause of global warming, either don’t believe there is enough evidence to blame man or believed it is caused by natural variation, if they believe it is happening at all to begin with. Another study from George Mason University found that 63 percent of weathercasters believe that any global warming that occurs is the result of “natural variation” and not “human activities.”
However, being the religion that global warming is, the mainstream media continues to ignore the facts voiced by those concerned for the Obama administration’s extreme environmental agenda and the impact it will have on economic opportunities for future generations of Americans.