RUTHFULLY YOURS

When did high school newspaper editors take over Western media? Decades ago, of course, and we’re unhappy to report that it seems they’re never going to grow up. The latest evidence? The early peak bloom of the cherry blossom trees along Washington’s Tidal Basin is being blamed on global warming.

The press has latched onto the man-made global warming narrative and it won’t let go.

The Washington Post couldn’t wait to inform its tell-us-what-to-believe readership that this year’s “peak occurred several days earlier than the long-term average, as human-caused climate warming hastens the onset of spring flowering.”

To its credit, the Post noted that reader comments “reflect a mix of opinions on the impact of climate change on the timing of cherry blossoms reaching peak bloom in D.C. Some commenters acknowledge that climate change, particularly the Urban Heat Island Effect, is causing earlier blooms, while others express skepticism or frustration with the focus on climate change.”

Maybe that’s the owner’s influence.

Meanwhile, ABC News said early last week that “in recent years, the peak bloom date for the cherry trees at the Tidal Basin reservoir is occurring earlier than it did in the past. Seasonal shifts, including milder, shorter winter seasons and spring warmth beginning earlier due to human-amplified climate change, are impacting when the cherry trees reach peak bloom, data shows.”

The data show no such thing. Anyone can infer from the numbers that “human-amplified climate change” is to blame (or credit, depending on the point of view), but they prove nothing.

A year ago, the same pair of ABC reporters said “many of Washington’s iconic flowering cherry trees will be cut down because of climate change.” They again blame “human-amplified climate change” for “rising sea levels” that “are leaving the National Park Service no choice but to cut down more than 150 trees that have lined the waterfront view for more than a century.”

Several local D.C. news sites as well as those elsewhere made similar claims, often using staff meteorologists to make the case that climate change is at work, with the implication that the change isn’t natural but the effect of man’s use of fossil fuels. But as far as we know, not single one parked their news vans or tried to broadcast from a dark studio to lower their carbon footprint.

As the alarmists spreading fear and engaged in the usual hysterics, H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute rated the entire cherry blossom news as “false.”

“Although the cherry blossom bloom has arrived earlier in recent years, the cause is the population increase in D.C, and development that has caused a localized heat biases from the urban heat island (UHI) effect, causing fewer late season freezes and higher average nighttime temperatures in the area,” he says. “The same is true for Tokyo.”

It has long been de rigueur in the press to declare without supportive evidence that every unusual weather event is due to human fossil fuel combustion. On occasion, the assertion is accompanied by a “scientists say” or “researchers say” to make an appeal to authority.

But when is the last time a climate skeptic or even a lukewarmer was given equal time in a story about weather? And the media have not even been subtle about their purge. When the agenda-minded Chuck Todd was hosting NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he declared that “human activity is a major cause, period,” of a warming Earth, so “we’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.”

That’s standard for the media almost across the entire board.

While the press has tried to disappear realists, they nevertheless exist, and, for starters, they’ve recently pointed out:

• “New Drought And Temperature Reconstructions Do Not Support The Climate Alarm Narrative“
• “Antarctica Ice Growing Across Large Areas for at Least 85 Years, Aerial Photos Show”
• “Our analysis reveals that human CO2 emissions, constituting a mere 4% of the annual carbon cycle, are dwarfed by natural fluxes. … We conclude that the anthropogenic CO2-global warming hypothesis lacks empirical substantiation, overshadowed by natural drivers such as temperature feedbacks and solar variability, necessitating a fundamental reevaluation of current climate paradigms.”
• “Wrong, Associated Press, Climate Change is not Triggering More Extreme Weather“
• “Study: Sahara’s Desertification Proves Climate Can Change Abruptly — Naturally“
• “Lapses of scientific integrity in climate science have become normalized. I no longer expect the community to care about obvious and egregious problems in climate science, even when documented in the peer reviewed literature.”

This is just a small sampling of the constant stream of narrative-busting work that the kids with the mainstream press deny because it doesn’t fit the tale they tell. They have become a pack of middle-school status seekers, incurious about anything that upsets them, ever trying to impress their peers, and behaving foolishly in their efforts to be taken seriously.