More Fake News from the NY Times
Here’s a creative effort to sell the story that the people with billion dollar industries, all the academic positions and a sympathetic media entourage are going underground, forced to disguise their belief about “climate change”.
This is a death-throes type article, clutching for ways to pretend Global Worriers are still relevant, and to feed a fantasy that they might be the underdog.
In America’s Heartland, Discussing Climate Change Without Saying ‘Climate Change’
So while climate change is part of daily conversation, it gets disguised as something else.
“People are all talking about it, without talking about it,” said Miriam Horn, the author of a recent book on conservative Americans and the environment, “Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman.” “It’s become such a charged topic that there’s a navigation people do.”
What really happened is that climate change is overused agitprop and people are tired of being beaten over the head with it. The first most compelling example the NY Times can find is a farmer called Doug Palen who talks about “carbon sequestration” in his soil (and what crop farmer wouldn’t?) Palen is painted as a “believer”:
In short, he is a climate change realist. Just don’t expect him to utter the words “climate change.”
But this is the strongest statement he makes:
“If politicians want to exhaust themselves debating the climate, that’s their choice,” Mr. Palen said, walking through fields of freshly planted winter wheat. “I have a farm to run.”
And he is so much of a believer “he didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton.” Need I say more?
Apparently anyone who discusses weather problems or ecology could be painted, via some kind of fantasy, as a believer in disguise who is hiding the topic of climate change. This is the best they could do?
Palen may be a believer (who knows), but there’s no evidence of it in his quotes. The article goes to quite some length to tell us about him, but it’s all just good farming science. Palen has “a conservationist streak” and is a no-till farming advocate. He looks after his soil, and feels alienated by environmentalists because he uses chemicals. Palen even says he wants to “be left alone” by the EPA. He sounds like every skeptical farmer I know yet this is the guy painted as the star example of an underground believer?
Last week, Mr. Palen, the farmer, was again talking weather — if not climate change — at a conference of no-till farmers in Salina, Kan. Sessions included “Using Your Water Efficiently,” “Making Weather Work for You in 2017” and “Building Healthy Soil With Mob Grazing,” a practice that helps to fertilize the land.
As evidence the topic is too hot to discuss, The NY Times writer, Hiroko Tabuchi, tells us a science teacher has even suffered “car keying” (like that never happens) and once got a letter from a student saying: “Know that God’s love surpasses knowledge.” Scary stuff indeed. Why even mention these?
To be fair though, the teacher did get a book bag thrown at him, so now he asks students if they like light bulbs as a soft way to lead into climate talk — as if climate science was anything like the science of light bulbs. (Light bulb models can predict things…)
Tabuchi manages to find some real believers who have realized they have to change their boring messaging. This also fits with my theory that ‘climate change’ is a dead dog topic on its way out. The last die-hards are repackaging the message, but few people care.
The editor of one magazine admits people hate the term “climate change”:
Mr. Kurns spoke candidly over concerns of a backlash in an editor’s note that led the issue. When he became the magazine’s editor two years earlier, he said, he had been warned, “Never use the words ‘climate change.’”
“I was told: ‘Readers hate that phrase. Just talk about the weather,’” he wrote.
Here is some of the hate mail he got in this “hot” arena:
“When you start quoting ‘climate scientists’ and the United Nations,” wrote in one reader, Bill Clinger, a farmer based in Harpster, Ohio, “you are as nutty as Al Gore.” Measures to control emissions, he said, “are just seductive names for socialist programs intended to micromanage people and businesses.”
If he got more aggressive or nasty letters you think they would have used them. So “that’s it”. A snowflake editor?
The NY Times Fake News moments:
The classic false memes get pushed:
“…well-financed push by fossil-fuel interests…”
How well financed are skeptics when believers get 3,500 times as much (and the rest).
The NY times has never even found a reason for oil companies to back skeptics since most of them lobby for carbon action, and profit from gas sales and like it when wind farms are subsidized.
More fake news:
She has sat through committee meetings where climate skeptics, including the discredited scientist Wei-Hock Soon, blasted the science behind global warming. “Carbon Dioxide, CO2, is merely a bit player in climate change,” reads one slide Mr. Soon presented in 2013. “Rising CO2 is largely beneficial to plant and human life.”
“I remember being horrified,” Ms. Kuether said.
Horrified that CO2 increases crop yields? Willie Soon is merely explaining the basics and his work stands up well on its own merits.
If he could be discredited because his university received “fossil fuel” money, that rules out everything the East Anglia Climate Unit has ever said. Since Big-government benefits from pushing the climate-panic button, this kind of reasoning rules out 97% of climate research.
If anyone could find a serious error in Willie Soon’s work we would all have heard about it.
This article is an experimental, floundering step in the transmogrification of the climate debate. Most of the science here has nothing to do with climate science and everything to do with plain old ecology, agriculture, and soil care. Tabuchi is blending together successful science with failures so he can rescue something from the disastrous climate change crusade.