New York Times, Meet Phil Jones

By Kevin Mooney

Just a few weeks before the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference convened in December of 2009, the New York Times saw fit to report on "a growing body of scientific evidence" showing human emissions are largely responsible for global warming that could prove catastrophic. The newspaper was hardly alone in promoting the alarmist position -- at the expense of other research that shows the human connection has been greatly exaggerated.

The past few weeks have been particularly painful for green activists and liberal reporters who have been crusading for anti-industry regulations for the ostensible purpose of saving the climate. Over 3,000 emails and other documents from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) have found their way to the Internet exposing the junk science that has given rise to manmade global warming theories. CRU is the incubator for many of those researchers who have authored the United Nations' global warming reports and fueled the political movement to regulate carbon.

In addition, the integrity of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has also come under fire in the past few weeks. Top officials who have hand in crafting some the major reports and findings in the IPCC have acknowledged recently that major mistakes have been made. The panel may need to revise previous statements on hurricanes, melting glaciers and overall warming trends in light of new evidence. Moreover hundreds of scientists are now on record questioning the premise of man-made global warming theories. In fact, some scientists are now convinced the earth has actually entered a cooling cycle that could persist for decades.

Phil Jones the director of the CRU indicated in a recent interview with the BBC that the debate on climate change is not over, in contradiction to earlier statements that said a scientific consensus has been established. He also conceded that the warming in the latter half of the 20th century may not have been unprecedented after all and could have been outpaced by the medieval warming period going back 800-1300 AD. Moreover, Jones now agrees that there has been no significant warming since the late 1990s.

If U.N. officials now admit that it is necessary to make revisions and to re-examine key claims, shouldn't the New York Times do the same?

In light of these new revelations, how do the following couple of bald assertions from the Times hold up in the paper's preview of the Copenhagen conference?

"A growing body of scientific evidence indicates that since 1950, the world's climate has been warming, primarily as a result of emissions from unfettered burning of fossil fuels and the razing of tropical forests. Such activity adds to the atmosphere's invisible blanket of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases. Recent research has shown that methane, which flows from landfills, livestock and oil and gas facilities, is a close second to carbon dioxide in impact on the atmosphere.

"That conclusion has emerged through a broad body of analysis in fields as disparate as glaciology, the study of glacial formations, and palynology, the study of the distribution of pollen grains in lake mud. It is based on a host of assessments by the world's leading organizations of climate and earth scientists.

"In the last several years, the scientific case that the rising human influence on climate could become disruptive has become particularly robust."

Come again?

Even before "climategate," hundreds of scientists went on record expressing skepticism toward U.N. favored theories. But their research went unreported in the Times. Overseas newspapers that previously ignored alternative views points on global warming have now opened up their coverage in the aftermath of "climategate."

It is long past time for the New York Times to at least acknowledge that the alarmist position they espoused is not above reproach and that there is a substantial amount of evidence now that nature -- not man -- is the engine behind warming and cooling cycles.

As TimesCheck.com has previously observed, the Times continues to fix demeaning labels on scientists who see little if any correlation between human activity and climate change. If the past few weeks are any indication of what may be coming, history will show that climate skeptics were more careful and methodical in their research than the New York Times was in its journalism.

Kevin Mooney is the editor of TimesCheck.com.