Another day, another Pulitzer prize given to The Washington Post for liberal content. This time, the prize was given for the paper’s reporting on climate change.
#Headdesk.
The Post’s media reporter Paul Farhi flaunted the news in a story headlined “Washington Post wins Pulitzer Prize for series that detailed environmental devastation in global hot spots.”
Farhi wrote how in late 2018, The Post’s “environmental writer Chris Mooney began noticing a small but recurring theme in scientific studies about climate change.”
Mooney’s epiphany? “Most places on the planet had gotten warmer on average over the preceding century, but some had become hotter than others.”
Mooney’s light-bulb moment apparently led to an entire climate change series that included “articles, photos, videos and graphics” and 53 people in The Post’s newsroom.
This was all part of an “effort to document places on the planet that had experienced above-average warming.”
“On Monday, a panel of judges awarded the series the Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s highest honor.” [Emphasis added.]
Break out the confetti.
Farhi broke down how the project, “dubbed ‘2C: Beyond the Limit’ for the benchmark two-degree Celsius temperature rise, won for explanatory journalism.” Specifically:
“Mooney, whose byline appeared on five of the 10 stories submitted for the Pulitzer, said his reading of the studies gave him ‘the sense that there was a common theme, where regions that were seeing unusually high levels of warming were seeing some type of bizarre or dramatic ecosystem upheaval.’”
Astonishingly, according to Farhi, “This year’s [Pulitzer] prizes were also the first during Donald Trump’s presidency in which no news organization was recognized for its reporting about Trump’s policies, finances or business practices.”
It appears the 53 negative headline stories The Post ran bashing the Trump administration’s coronavirus policies between January 17 and April 25 didn’t make the cut.
NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham broke down the descent of the once-acclaimed Pulitzer prize into a biased token of liberal media self-aggrandizement:
“Over the previous three years, four Pulitzer Prizes for reporting were handed out for exposing Donald Trump’s apparently shady deeds, from alleged Russian collusion to tax evasion. In the previous eight years, there’s not a single reporting prize handed out for exposing anything about Barack Obama or his team. Democracy was never in darkness back then.”
Read more at NewsBusters
More than a century ago commodity speculators in England noticed a correlation between some crop output levels and sun spot activity. That correlation was apparently sufficiently consistent to attract hedging and speculating.
It turns out that our climate in the past may have been influenced by cycles of sun activity. Sun activity cycles result in changes in cloud coverage. Cloud coverage, in turn, dictates how much sun radiation reaches the earth’s surface and that leads to cycles of both global coolings and warmings. Cloud cover influence has long been a concern of climatologists but direct measurements were not possible.
More than two decades ago Henrik Svensmark, a Danish physicist, and his associates (an astrophysicist and an oceanographer) proposed a new climate theory which, incidentally, did not involve CO2. Svensmark claimed that warmings and coolings were brought on by variation in sun activity. Svensmark claimed that sun activity has an impact on a relatively constant stream of cosmic rays which otherwise penetrate the lower atmosphere. During periods when more cosmic rays penetrate the lower atmosphere that additional penetration leads to more cloud coverage. (CERN has confirmed that cosmic rays can influence cloud cover.)
The level of cloud coverage determines the amount of warming. Recently (December 2019) sun activity dropped significantly. If this new inactive sun cycle persists for the usual decade or more, it will result in a cyclic increase in the average cloud coverage which, according to Svensmark, should bring on another cooling period. It is also possible that longer term variations in cosmic ray level penetration may occur as our Solar System makes its 250 million year revolution around the Milky Way.
Recently Don Easterbrook, a geologist, came out with a comprehensive study (an entire book) which makes use of available data covering the past 800,000 years. That extended duration includes the last few most recent ice ages. (Each ice age is now referred to as a “glaciation” because apparently the past 65 million years show a long term cooling underway!) Easterbrook’s book title says it all: “The Solar Magnetic Cause of Climate Changes and Origin of the Ice Ages”.
The conclusions in Easterbrook’s book are clearly not wishy-washy. He has put his reputation on the line, probably recognizing that the usual peer-review process by a like-minded scientist in the next cubby would end with the results being filed away in the same closet as Biden’s China and Ukraine payoffs, together with the rape accusations.
Easterbrook’s firm quoted conclusions (page 176) follow:
“EVERY cool period was characterized by low sunspot numbers, indicating low strength of the sun’s magnetic field, and high production rates of beryllium-10 and radiocarbon, indicating a high intensity of cosmic rays. EVERY warm period was coincident with high sunspot numbers and low production rates of beryllium-10 and radiocarbon. Thus, it is unequivocally clear that climate changes, large and small, are driven by fluctuations of the sun’s magnetic field.”
While Easterbrook claims that his data and conclusions stand, whether or not Svensmark’s theory survives, his results appear to further validate Svensmark’s theory.
Alarmists insist that neither the Medieval Warming Period nor the subsequent Little Ice Age were global. Easterbrook’s analysis implies that all prior warmings were caused by sun activity, so ALL prior warmings were, by definition, global.
Alarmist modelers have no explanation for any future cooling. Even with no further CO2 level increase their theory demands that the current warming level must persist. There are other conflicts with the alarmist position, including a mild three decade cooling from 1945-1975 as CO2 continued to increase, and also the IPCC acknowledged “hiatus” in temperature during the 2000s as CO2 continued its increase. The greenhouse gas theory, used liberally by alarmists to justify their arguments, is accompanied by a necessary condition: when the GHG application involves the open atmosphere there must also be an accompanying “signature”, a warmer region about 10km above the tropics. Despite decades of radiosondes that supposed “hot spot” has never been found and it’s not a matter of missing data. Actual temperatures have been recorded both above and below 10km. The two attempts by CAGW proponents (Sherwood and Santer) claiming to explain that missing “hot spot” both ignore the existing data and further exacerbate that gross error with speculation.
It is amazing that most of the major news media science writers ignore what appears to be the obvious implications of Easterbrook’s study. The MWP and earlier warmings were global (and, as Phil Jones, an early proponent of anthropogenic-caused warming has publicly stated, if the MWP was global it’s a different ballgame. Jones’ uncertainty also indicates that the alarmists do not have much in the way of supporting evidence.)
Any credible climatologist should by now feel obligated to investigate and verify or rebut Easterbrook’s data. If that data is valid the conclusions are a no-brainer, namely, ALL prior warmings (and coolings) were global and due to sun activity. Since there is no evidence that CO2, a trace gas, has any impact on our global temperature, why should the cause of our most recent warming, beginning in about 1975, be related to CO2 increase? Increasing CO2 level remains an important issue but is unrelated to warming. Apparently it is the cosmos, rather than humans, which remains in charge of our climate.
Maybe the Pooh – Latzer is about as
esteemed as the Nobel Peace prize
which is found in every box of
Cracker Jax
Not the first time someone won a Pulitzer for fake news story Strobe Talbot from the liberal rag TIME also received a Pulitzer for a fake story the Washington Compost is just another liberal leftists rag of fake news
Wow!
A Pulitzer Prize for a pack of lies!