The New York Times Building in New York City. (photo: AP)
After
Hyping Itself as Antidote to Fake News, New York Times Hires Extreme Climate
Denier
By Joe Romm, Think Progress
15 April 17
New columnist Bret Stephens dismisses as “imaginary” the climate
reality routinely reported by the Times. They can’t both be right.
The
New York Times — which advertises itself as a defender of truth in the Trump
era — just hired an extreme
denier of climate science as a columnist.
Bret
Stephens was most recently deputy editorial page editor for Rupert Murdoch’s
deeply conservative and climate-denying Wall
Street Journal, where, in 2015, he wrote that climate change — along with
hunger in America, campus rape statistics, and institutionalized racism— are
“imaginary enemies.” He will now take those views to the New York Times.
Stephens
is unusually extreme and divisive even for a climate science denier, also
comparing scientists and those who accept their findings to Stalinists,
anti-semites, and communists.
The
scientific findings that Stephens has repeatedly dismissed as “imaginary” are
routinely published in the New York Times itself. And in an August job description, the
New York Times called climate change “the most important story in the world.”
Stephens calls it “hysteria.”
This
hiring is “a very sad comment on the New York Times’ judgment,” Dr. Robert J.
Brulle, a media expert at Drexel University, told ThinkProgress via email.
Brulle, whom the Times itself has called “an expert
on environmental communications,” said this hiring “contradicts their claim” in
a new ad campaign that truth is “now more important than ever” to the Times.
In
a fawning press release, the
Times calls Stephens “a beautiful writer” who brings to the paper, “profound
intellectual depth, honesty and bravery.”
Judge
for yourself:
Stephens’
July 2008 column, titled, “Global Warming as Mass Neurosis,” begins, “last
week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as
global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited.”
His December 2009 column,
examining the motivations of those who accept the overwhelming consensus on
climate change, says, “one of those [motivations], I suspect, is what I would
call the totalitarian impulse. This is not to say that global warming true
believers are closet Stalinists. But their intellectual methods are
instructively similar.” He then goes on to compare climate scientists and those
who accept their finding to anti-Semites and Communists.
Stephens
has not softened his anti-science views even as the evidence and analysis showing
human-caused climate change has gotten stronger. In fact, it is quite the
reverse.
His
November 2015 column, “Liberalism’s Imaginary Enemies,”
previewing the Paris climate talks, calls concern over climate change
“hysteria” and compares global warming to hunger in America, institutionalized
racism, and campus rape statistics — all things he says are “imaginary
enemies.”
Anyone
who thinks Stephens has any qualifications whatsoever to be a New York Times
columnist should read the full article. And this
offensive balderdash is from a person the Times is now bragging has “profound
intellectual depth, honesty and bravery.”
On
climate change, he writes:
The hysteria generated by an imperceptible temperature rise of 1.7
degrees Fahrenheit since 1880 — as if the trend is bound to continue forever,
or is not a product of natural variation, or cannot be mitigated except by
drastic policy interventions. The hyping of flimsy studies — melting Himalayan
glaciers; vanishing polar ice — to press the political point….
Here’s a climate prediction for the year 2115: Liberals will still
be organizing campaigns against yet another mooted social or environmental
crisis. Temperatures will be about the same.
To
assert there will be no temperature rise over the next hundred years and that
climate change is imaginary is to go further than the overwhelming majority of
professional climate science deniers. This is Breitbart- or Putin-level fake
news.
What
flimsy studies of vanishing polar ice could he possibly be talking about? We
have direct observations from multiple sources — satellites, airplanes, direct
human measurements — that show both polar sea ice and the land-based ice are disappearing at record rates.
Do the
editors of the New York Times now consider this major front-page story to be
“hysteria generated by an imperceptible temperature rise of 1.7 degrees
Fahrenheit since 1880?” What about the December front-page story in which
the Times warned that the
“perils of climate change could swamp coastal real estate?”
By
hiring Bret Stephens, the Times is making a mockery of its new ad campaign on
the importance of truth — and it is impugning the reporting of its own
professional journalists.
Climatologist
Michael Mann warned in a 2014 Times op-ed that
“a fringe minority of our populace clings to an irrational rejection of
well-established science [which also] infects the halls of Congress, the pages
of leading newspapers and what we see on TV.”
On
Thursday, Mann told ThinkProgress via email, “sadly, the New York Times itself
seems to have fallen victim to this malady, hiring one of the most notorious
climate change deniers, Bret Stephens, to promote climate denial propaganda on
the once-hallowed pages of the Grey Lady.”
Brulle
said “the New York Times should rescind his hiring.”
If
not, what exactly do they stand for and why should anyone read them?
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment