Hurricanes

NewsBusters readers are quite familiar with the frantic hyperbole that often come from the keystrokes of Newsweek's so-called science editor Sharon Begley. On Saturday she penned another breathless doozy with the Hitchcockian sub-headline "In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. Why we’re unprepared for the harrowing future":

The cause for the end of the world has been imagined by screenwriters to include everything from giant insects and malevolent robots to asteroids the size of Texas. But five year ago in May 2006, Hollywood found a new menace: carbon dioxide. This scenario was different in another respect. It was supposedly true. The documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" wasn't intended to be the blockbuster…

Less than 24 hours after a devastating tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri – killing at least 116 people – an MSNBC anchor was busy putting a political spin on the tragedy. Tamron Hall wondered aloud on "News Nation" today whether climate change was to blame for the rash of hurricanes and tornadoes that ravaged several states, including Missouri, over the last few months.

To give you an idea of the kind of hysterical predictions the global warming crowd have made in recent years, the United Nations in 2005 actually forecast that by the end of the previous decade, there would be 50 million environmental refugees around the world as a result of climate change. Britain's Guardian reported October 12, 2005:

For the second time in eight days, a prominent liberal has blamed the developing crisis in Egypt on global warming. Following in the footsteps of climate alarmist extraordinaire Joe Romm Monday was New York Times columnist Paul Krugman:

Since Al Gore's schlockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth" came out in 2006, Americans have been deluged on almost a daily basis about the evils of a slowly warming planet.On Thursday, USAToday.com surprisingly offered an upside to rising temperatures:A new study out Wednesday in the British journal Nature finds that large, powerful North Atlantic ocean storms should actually become less frequent…

The Boston Globe, long notorious as promoters of global warming doom and gloom -- see Ross Gelbspan, for example -- sometimes get embarrassed by the actual climate. On "The Green Blog," the Globe's Beth Daley projected that a "global warming double punch" could make Hurricane Earl much worse for Massachusetts -- except when it actually passed by, it turned out to be a dud for Bostonians and it…

UPDATE - 7/13, 1:30 pm: In the face of criticism, the Coast Guard just rescinded this policy, allowing reporters free access to Gulf spill recovery efforts. Details below.Effectively reporting on the Gulf oil spill is now a Class D felony, punishable by a fine of up to $40,000.That's right, the most transparent administration in history has made it a felony, effective July 1, to get within 65…

When Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans in 2005, numerous media members blamed racism for President Bush's supposedly poor response to the disaster.According to LexisNexis, there were almost 1,000 reports in the nine weeks following the storm's passage through the Gulf of Mexico that tied racism to the government's post-hurricane strategy.Five years later, as oil slams the same region and…

The mainstream media seem to have boiled down the president's reaction to the Gulf spill to two caricatures: either he has failed to satiate public appetites by feigning outrage, or he is succeeding by acting angry. Whereas journalists rightly expected President Bush to do something about Katrina--and excoriated him when he supposedly didn't do enough--the media seem content listening to Obama…

The mainstream media is of course replete with liberal opinionistas who criticize Republicans far more harshly than Democrats. That is nothing new. It is truly shocking, however, when supposedly "objective" news outlets employ even more egregious double standards than the openly-biased commentators.The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto caught the Associated Press employing one such double…

On Sunday’s syndicated Chris Matthews Show, Time magazine columnist Joe Klein joined the ranks of left-leaning media figures like Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann in blaming the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on the Bush administration. As the panel discussed President Obama’s handling of the disaster, Klein opined that "this is more Bush’s second Katrina than Obama’s first," and, after…

It's the American way, right? It is patriotic to exercise the 1st Amendment by petitioning the government for a redress of grievances - unless of course your effort has a tie to some corporation or lobbying interest. Then regardless of its size, it's phony baloney Astroturf activism. While groups like the George Soros-funded MoveOn.org have managed to elude the "Astroturf" moniker, from its…