The New York Times' Global Warming Agenda

Steven Milloy has an interesting article in his junk science series over at FoxNews. The article concerns two of my favorite subjects--New York Times bias and a debunking of global warming.

On Oct. 10, the NYT published an article entitled, "As Polar Ice Turns to Water, Dreams of Treasure Abound." The article discusses investments being made to control rights to land that this being revealed by the melting of the northern polar ice cap. The arctic region holds a huge amount of natural gas and oil resources, so obviously there is a lot of money to be made. That in itself is an interesting story. However, the Times felt compelled to add this:

The Times spotlighted, for example, a Denver entrepreneur who purchased a “derelict Hudson Bay port from the Canadian government in 1997” for $7. The entrepreneur, who estimates the port could bring in as much as $100 million per year, “is no more to blame than anyone else for a meltdown at the top of the world that threatens Arctic mammals and ancient traditions and lends credibility to dark visions about global warming,” reported the Times.

“It’s the positive side of global warming, if there is a positive side,” the transportation minister of Manitoba told the Times.

What I love here is that global warming is stated as a fact, as if the article were discussing the law of gravity or the second law of thermodynamics. Milloy provides some interesting data that refutes the theory of human activity causing global warming. I suggest you read the whole article, linked above, if you are interested but the most compelling data were presented in a graph here, along with this analysis:

Now if the 1880-1938 warming trend had continued up until this day, there certainly would be some significant warming in the Arctic region to talk about. From 1918 to 1938, alone, the Arctic warmed by 2.5 degrees Centigrade. But the actual temperature trend is much different, showing that there’s been hardly any overall temperature change in the Arctic since 1938.

[...]

During the warming period from 1880 to 1938, it’s estimated that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide – the bugbear of greenhouse gases to global warming worriers – increased by an estimated 20 parts per million. But from 1938 to 2003 – a period of essentially no increase in Arctic warming – the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide increased another 60 parts per million. It doesn’t seem plausible, then, that Arctic temperatures are significantly influenced by atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases.

It is unfortunate that no matter what the real truth, if you repeat something often enough it starts to be perceived to be true. I'm sure if a poll were conducted of young Americans, a vast majority would indicate that irresponsible human activity has resulted in catastrophic global warming. But as a scientist I find it disheartening that propaganda and not data becomes the basis for "the truth".