A NY neighborhood 'begrimed' by bikes

For the Wall Street Journal, though, it is a program designed by “totalitarians,” which has “absolutely begrimed” New York’s “best neighborhoods,” all “so that New Yorkers can feel that they are in Paris and London.” Yes, Mayor Bloomberg is a Euro-socialist dictator! And bikes are so much uglier and dirtier than taxis and parking spots.

Here is WSJ editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz being interviewed by a WSJ staffer who together repeat just about every anti-bike myth imaginable on New York City’s new bike-share program.

It is chilling to believe that any member of that uber-elitest editorial board actually believes “I represent the majority of citizens of the city.”

The myths in that interview have all been debunked by Business Insider (here), most notably that the program has been “sneaked under the radar” — what with “159 public meetings” and “230 private meetings with officials, property owners, and others.”

Let me just add that Washington, DC has had an identical — and very successful — Bike Share program since 2008. But then everyone knows we have been taken over by Euro-socialists.

Or maybe it is Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal that has been taken over — by the pro-pollution crowd:

• Not The Onion: Wall Street Journal Hits “Rock Bottom” With Inane Op-Ed Urging “More Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide”

The NY Times reports today that the Koch brothers are hoping to become media moguls like Rupert Murdoch:

Now, Koch Industries, the sprawling private company of which Charles G. Koch serves as chairman and chief executive, is exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.

As if pro-pollution right-wing extremists don’t have enough control over U.S. and global media — see Scientist: “The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Perhaps One or Two Decades in Battle Against Climate Change.”

The papers, valued at roughly $623 million, would be a financially diminutive deal for Koch Industries, the energy and manufacturing conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., with annual revenue of about $115 billion.

Politically, however, the papers could serve as a broader platform for the Kochs’ laissez-faire ideas. The Los Angeles Times is the fourth-largest paper in the country, and The Tribune is No. 9, and others are in several battleground states, including two of the largest newspapers in Florida, The Orlando Sentinel and The Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. A deal could include Hoy, the second-largest Spanish-language daily newspaper, which speaks to the pivotal Hispanic demographic.

Apparently the Koch brothers feel they are getting a raw deal in the portion of the ever-shrinking media not controlled by conservative or corporate interests.

One person … who spoke on the condition of anonymity described the strategy as follows: “It was never ‘How do we destroy the other side?’ ”

“It was ‘How do we make sure our voice is being heard?’ ”

…“A running joke among conservatives as we watched the G.O.P. establishment spend $500 million on ineffectual TV ads is ‘Why don’t you just buy NBC?’ ” Mr. Motley said. “It’s good the Kochs are talking about fighting fire with a little fire.”

Koch Industries has for years felt the mainstream media unfairly covered the company and its founding family because of its political beliefs.

Yes, we aren’t hearing the poor, misunderstood Koch brothers — even though they now outspend Exxon Mobil on pro-pollution disinformation aimed at preventing action to preserving a livable climate, and they fund and help oversee the extremist Tea Party movement.

No, the Kochs don’t want to destroy the other side. They have bigger ambitions.  They want to destroy the planet.

On going through my old draft posts, I came across this unexpectedly accurate story in the Wall Street Journal from January:

More Droughts, Floods, Extreme Weather Expected With Warming Climate

Rising temperatures in the U.S. already have brought more frequent heat waves, droughts, floods and other extreme weather and scientists expect more of the same as a result of climate change, according to a government study released Friday.

Average U.S. temperatures have risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895, with most of the increase occurring in the past 30 years, according to a draft of the National Climate Assessment.

Climate Progress covered the story at the time with this headline “End Climate Silence Now: Draft Climate Assessment Warns Of Devastating 9°-15°F Warming Over Most Of U.S.”

If you are wondering how Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ, home of the worst opinion page on climate in the country, could  get the story right, well, it was a wire story from Dow Jones.

And, purely coincidentally, the author’s name was Cassandra Sweet, which all too well suggests how Journal editors view all such prescient warnings:

• Error-Riddled Matt Ridley Piece Lowballs Climate Change, Discredits Wall Street Journal. World Faces 10°F Warming.
• Bjorn Legacy: Lomborg Urges Climate Inaction With Misleading Stats In Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal
• The Wall Street Journal Does It Again: Another Whopper Of A Lie On Climate Science

Over the weekend, 35,000 Forward On Climate protesters called on President Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. They apparently had one surprising ally: News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch.

In a series of tweets Friday, Murdoch questioned if the Keystone XL project is worth the risk:

Is Keystone Pipeline really good idea? Bringing lots of heavy, dirty oil across country, when fracked, cheaper, cleaner energy available

— @rupertmurdoch February 15, 2013

Keystone Pipeline not needed for energy independence. Many opinions, let’s discuss. And let’s stop wasting money on ridiculous windmills.

— @rupertmurdoch February 15, 2013

Murdoch’s two tweets do manage to misrepresent clean energy and natural gas, which is not surprising from the oil shale investor. There is nothing ridiculous about wind energy when it is beating natural gas in new capacity and supports 76,000 jobs; at the same time, methane emissions from natural gas poses a major climate threat.

But Murdoch still alludes to one painful fact. Fully exploiting Canadian tar sands crude through Keystone XL, while burning oil, gas, and coal, would mean “game over” for the climate, since the carbon-intensive tar sands contain more emissions than our entire global consumption in history.

He would never have known this watching News Corp-owned Fox News, given some of the network’s grossly exaggerated claims about the pipeline’s benefits. Fox reporting includes ratcheting up the number of jobs TransCanada would create to “hundreds of thousands” or a “million,” when the project is poised to create just 20 permanent jobs. Throughout its coverage, Fox has mostly quoted Keystone XL proponents, and after the historic climate rally this weekend, Neil Cavuto mocked protesters for holding a global warming rally during winter.

(HT: Houston Chronicle)

You can help fight the denier attacks on Michael Mann by buying his book, reading it, and then reviewing it at Amazon.com.

The most vindicated climate scientist in America, Michael Mann, has published an excellent new book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. How much do the climate science disinformers want to discourage you from reading it? I’ve reported that the deniers immediately launched an attack on the book and on the positive reviews on Amazon.com.

Now Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has decided that rather than just ignoring the book, they would have it ‘reviewed’ by their leading anti-science and anti-scientist editorial page writer, Anne Jolis.

I say “anti-science” because, as recently as Septmber, Jolis wrote an entire ‘opinion’ piece on “The Other Climate Theory:  Al Gore won’t hear it, but heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends.” Yes, she was pushing the long-debunked “cosmic ray” theory of climate change based on a CERN paper — months after its lead author explained that the paper “actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it’s a very important first step.” Multiple peer-reviewed papers make clear that cosmic rays aren’t driving significant climatic change.

I say “anti-scientist” because, as forest science expert Simon Lewis wrote here in a 2010 debunking of another one of Jolis’s masterpieces of misinformation:

I asked Peter Cox what he thought about the WSJ article. He was surprised that he was featured in a climate science bashing editorial. While his quotes were correctly transcribed Prof. Cox was not told that the article was about attacking climate science. The same journalist tried the same sleight-of-hand with me over a potential Amazongate article. So memo to scientists. If Anne Jolis of the WSJ contacts you, watch out, or you could find yourself being tricked into starring in an article about scientists not being open and honest.

It’s safe to say that if you ask Jolis to write review of a book on climate science, you know what you’re going to get. And, indeed, the review reveals that Jolis remains a one-trick pony.

Here she is with what I suppose she considers a devastating example of hypocrisy but which is an unintentional revelation of her own biases:

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A lot of folks have asked me to debunk the recent anti-truthful Wall Street Journal article with the counterfactual headline, “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.”  I’ll combine my debunking with the rapidly growing list of debunkings from scientists and others.  And I’ll update this as new debunkings come in.

That the WSJ would publish an amateurish collection of falsehoods and half truths is no surprise.   The entire global Murdoch enterprise is designed to advance the pollutocrat do-nothing agenda (see Scientist: “The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Perhaps One or Two Decades in Battle Against Climate Change”).  As National Academy of Sciences member Peter Gleick explains in his evisceration of the piece, “Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal“:

But the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. The National Academy of Sciences is the nation’s pre-eminent independent scientific organizations. Its members are among the most respected in the world in their fields. Yet the Journal wouldn’t publish this letter, from more than 15 times as many top scientists. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because some so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.

Science magazine – perhaps the nation’s most important journal on scientific issues – published the letter from the NAS members after the Journal turned it down.

A tad more surprising is that 16 admittedly non-leading scientists would choose to soil their reputations by stringing together a collection of long-debunked falsehoods.  What is surprising is that these falsehoods are more easily debunked than the typical disinformer clap-trap because they are so out-of-date!

Guys, if you’re going to push disinformation, you have to do better than this:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.  This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”….

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.

Well, as the chart above shows, the last 10 years were easily the hottest on record.  As the Union of Concerned Scientists debunking notes, “2011 was the 35^th year in a row in which global temperatures were above the historical average and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.”  Doh!

And apparently these guys missed the news that last year’s Koch-Funded and Skeptic-Led Study Finds Recent Warming “On the High End” and Speeding Up.  The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) concluded:

… we find that the global land mean temperature has increased by 0.911 ± 0.042 C since the 1950s….  our analysis suggests a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstruction.

Double Doh!

Then again, what do you expect from a list of 16 scientists that include:

• Richard Lindzen, one of the most debunked  climate scientists in the world (see Lindzen debunked again: New scientific study finds his paper downplaying dangers of human-caused warming is “seriously in error”:  Trenberth: The flaws in Lindzen-Choi paper “have all the appearance of the authors having contrived to get the answer they got”).  See also Kerry Emanuel slams media, asserts Lindzen charge in Boston Globe is “pure fabrication.”
• William Happer, physicist, Chairman of the Board of a leading disinformer think-tank George Marshall Institute, heavily funded by Exxon Mobil and other anti-science funders.
• Roger Cohen, Former manager for Strategic Planning and Programs ExxonMobil Corporation, now a George Marshall Institute ‘expert’.
• Harrison H. Schmitt, geologist and astronaut, who believes enviros and climate scientists like Holdren are communists.

This gang that couldn’t shoot straight assert “it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.” In fact, as Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency explained last year, the world is on pace for 11°F warming, and “Even School Children Know This Will Have Catastrophic Implications for All of Us.”

Yes, even school children know more than these guys!

They utterly misrepresent the work of serious climatologists like Kevin Trenberth.  Anybody who is actually paying attention to real science knows Trenberth explained 2 years ago that the way the disinformers were quoting him was nonsense, and they know recent analysis has done a good job of identifying where the “missing” warming went — the deep oceans (see my 9/11 post “Hottest Decade on Record Would Have Been Even Hotter But for Deep Oceans — Accelerated Warming May Be On Its Way“).  Let’s go through this one more time.

As Trenberth explained back in 2009, we have a vast amount of evidence that “global warming is continuing”:

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