“Consider the case closed on global warming.”
That’s how Bryan Walsh started his Time magazine feature in the February 19 issue, the latest attempt by Time to close the debate on global warming. Last year, the April 3 issue of the magazine told readers to “Be Worried. Be Very Worried,” and that the “the serious debate has quietly ended.”
Now Walsh added that the recent United Nations report had “fingered the culprits behind global warming” – mankind.
He didn’t mince words when it came to advocating government mandates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) document’s conclusions.
“As the IPCC report shows, the price of inaction will be enormous for all of us,” Walsh wrote.
But the “us” who would act doesn’t include all of the “us” who pollute the atmosphere, as Walsh mentioned. China – on track to overtake the United States as the World’s No. 1 Emitter – still refuses to sign on to a Kyoto-like treaty even as it demands action from the United States.
The brief Time feature highlighted several of the IPCC report’s major points, including rising temperatures, sea levels and stronger hurricanes. And where the predictions weren’t sufficiently frightening, Time elaborated with speculation.
“The report predicts sea levels will rise 7 in. to 23 in. Bad, but not too dire, right? But this assessment doesn’t account for the possibility of accelerated glacial melting …” Time warned. Even the U.N. report hailed by Time wasn’t sufficiently apocalyptic, so the story undermined that one conclusion.
Global warming coverage rarely fails to account for every scary possibility, though journalists seem afraid to account for the possibility that the world isn’t ending.
Time admitted that environmentalists have been successful removing “pollution’s protective haze” from pollution particles in the atmosphere that reflect solar energy. It quickly added that “invisible – and harmful – carbon emissions are still on the rise.”
And the IPCC take on stronger hurricanes, according to Time? It’s “more likely than not” that man is responsible, despite weather experts who have said the opposite. Time acknowledged the World Meteorological Organization’s earlier dispute of the stronger-storms claim, but implied that the IPCC’s “likely” statement replaced the meteorologists’.
