Scary stories: Peter Foster, Financial Post

This past week -- as delegates from 182 countries circled and plotted in Bonn about how to avoid the great upcoming Copenhagen Climate Policy Collapse -- there appeared the usual bumper crop of stories that either regurgitated climate alarmism, positively promoted it, or otherwise carried the banner for pointless policy upheaval.

Despite Al Gore's claims of too much denialism in the press, the mainstream media has been almost entirely captured by his alleged "Inconvenient Truth." The skeptical voices that have always been essential to science--and freedom--have been marginalized and ridiculed, and nonsense walks proudly on stilts.
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The one straight statistic to emerge from the subsequent piece was that the sea level had risen by 20 centimetres in San Francisco Bay over the past hundred years. However, reporter Leslie McKinnon quickly switched to forecasts of sea level rises of "a metre to a metre and a half " made by somebody called Peter Gleick of something called the Pacific Institute. [Fraudster] Mr. Gleick declared that sea level rises were accelerating -- or at least would be--because climate change was happening "faster and faster."
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Achim Steiner, who heads the UN Environment Programme, was quoted as saying that "There have been many milestones reached in recent years, but this report suggests renewable energy has now reached a tipping point where it is as important --if not more important --in the global energy mix than fossil fuels."
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At the conference, the Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels suggested that the success of alarmism had a lot to do with the absence of fact-checking in the media. But while that may be true, it seems as much due to the fact that many in the media regard themselves as eco-warriors. As such, they never let the facts stand in the way of a good, scary environmental story.