CNN’s chief climate correspondent, Bill Weir, lamented that climate change has prevented people from ice skating on Central Park’s ponds like they did “back in the 19th century.” [some emphasis, links added]
Videos from social media, however, show people have been skating on the ice in recent weeks.
“This is the new reality,” Weir said during a live hit on CNN from New York City earlier this week, noting that there are bigger “water events on our overheated planet.”
“I was talking to somebody, remembering, talking about how back in the 19th century, they used to ice skate regularly here in Central Park. It doesn’t freeze. It’s not cold enough for a long enough period of time for that to happen anymore.”
But in early January, a TikTok user who goes by the name “evtheskater” filmed himself skating around the Central Park lake. Weeks later, the social media news account New Yorkers posted a video compilation of others doing the same.
“With NYC freezing for over a week, the lake in Central Park has frozen solid, and people are walking and skating on top of it,” the account reported on Feb. 2.
A few days later, another news account also posted videos of people out and about on the frozen Central Park lake, commenting that “people started walking and ice-skating on it.”
A picture posted on Reddit showed a large number of people walking around on the lake: “This used to be a pond [a] few days ago !” the user wrote.
Some accounts noted that the New York City Police Department had started warning people to stay off the ice for safety reasons.
The city’s Department of Parks and Recreation states on its website that people should never go on frozen waters, and the city has constructed two public ice rinks in Central Park, one of which has been in operation since 1950.
It was then that city officials stopped allowing skaters to venture out onto the lake in Central Park, though climate change was not cited as a reason for the change.
Weir’s comments, which were made in the aftermath of a massive East Coast nor’easter, are the latest example of the media appearing to overstate the impacts of global warming.
Read rest at Free Beacon
