By Scott Italiaander

In a previous post (scroll down), I linked to Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe’s speech “Hot & Cold Media Spin: A Challenge To Journalists Who Cover Global Warming” delivered on the floor of the Senate in September. As the title suggests, this speech focused on the extent to which the media has been carrying the water of the global warming alarmists:

It is an inconvenient truth that so far, 2006 has been a year in which major segments of the media have given up on any quest for journalistic balance, fairness and objectivity when it comes to climate change. The global warming alarmists and their friends in the media have attempted to smear scientists who dare question the premise of man-made catastrophic global warming, and as a result some scientists have seen their reputations and research funding dry up.

Sen. Inhofe notes that a British public policy group referred to this media intimidation, alarmism and propagandizing as “climate porn,” designed to attract public attention. Inhofe finds it interesting that while much attention is given to the horrors of “global warming,” rarely are the positive effects that such warming would have on plant and animal life and food production mentioned.

Inhofe, who as chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has spent more time on this issue than just about any elected official in Washington, reports on the attempts made by “mainstream” pro-warming scientists to expunge from the public record any evidence it finds inconvenient to support it claims:

The National Academy of Sciences report reaffirmed the existence of [a] Medieval Warm Period from about 900 AD to 1300 AD and [a] Little Ice Age from about 1500 to 1850. Both of these periods occurred long before the invention of the SUV or human industrial activity could have possibly impacted the Earth’s climate. In fact, scientists believe the Earth was warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings grew crops in Greenland.

Climate alarmists have been attempting to erase the inconvenient Medieval Warm Period from the Earth’s climate history for at least a decade. David Deming, an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma’s College of Geosciences, can testify first hand about this effort. Dr. Deming was welcomed into the close-knit group of global warming believers after he published a paper in 1995 that noted some warming in the 20th century. Deming says he was subsequently contacted by a prominent global warming alarmist and told point blank “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”

It seems that scientists who dare to defy the alarmist conventional wisdom are not the only ones to come under attack. Senator Inhofe himself was the subject of a New York Times editorial last week in which his very credibility is questioned merely because of his effrontery in challenging climate change orthodoxy. Rather than refute Inhofe’s assertions from a scientific perspective, the editorial attacked his refusal to go along with “the consensus” among “mainstream” scientists and the industrialized nations of the world that climate change is man-made.

The columnist Debra Saunders writes that “global warming is a religion, not science. That’s why acolytes in the media attack global warming critics not with scientific arguments, but for apostasy.” The sin, apparently, is not in the weakness of scientific arguments on the part of those who criticize the global warming alarmists, but in the very act of criticizing them at all.

Senator Inhofe apparently finds all this amusing. “I see a sense of desperation that I haven’t seen before, and frankly I am enjoying it,” Inhofe told Saunders. He was referring to the degree to which the media shamelessly lauds any public figure who merely “believes” in the coming catastrophe of global warming, without regard to whether these public figures take any personal actions to prevent it. Saunders notes that the media allows Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to “get into global-warming heaven just for believing, despite his four Hummers and use of a private jet.”

As for the science itself, I am not in a position to judge the existence or severity of the threat of climate change. I am pretty sure however that, whenever the New York Times uses terms like “consensus” and “mainstream,” the paper is relying on its unique definitions of those words. In my world “consensus” means general agreement. Apparently not in the world of the Times, for it ignores the works of well-known MIT scientist Richard Lindzen, Oklahoma geology professor David Deming, and at least 60 scientists in Canada who do not agree on the existence or nature of the climate change threat.

I suppose these scientists are not “mainstream” enough for the editors of the Times, who seem to exclude from the mainstream any who don’t agree with them.

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Ms. Saunders states that global warming alarmism is a religion, but I believe it is merely a sacrament in a greater religious system, Secular Humanism, which posits that life is purely a natural phenomenon, and exists and “evolves” according to natural laws. Since there is no supernatural being, at least not one that is still active in the world, man must exercise his judgment, reason and intelligence in adopting an ethical code suitable to the times. By putting Man, not God, at the center of the universe, adherents to Secular Humanism tend to believe that man has the capacity to alter the natural world (i.e., cause climate change or for that matter, reverse it).