Certainly not large numbers of greens, politicians, climate bureaucrats, economists, elites in business and Hollywood, and left/right reporters and commentators.

A few decades ago, I headed an influential environmental group in the competitive media centers of New York City and northern New Jersey. To establish trust with the press, the public, and politicians, my four guiding principles for the group were:  1) be reasonable, 2) be nonpartisan, 3) stick with facts, and 4) recommend practical cost-effective solutions.

The principles worked, judging by the resulting widespread bipartisan political support and the extensive positive media coverage, including a New Jersey daily honoring me on its Sunday front page as “Community Service Volunteer of the Year.”

Oh my, how times have changed. Now when it comes to global warming, much of the American media and Western media, in general, seem more interested in alarmism than reasonableness, nonpartisanship, facts, and practical, cost-effective solutions.

A glaring example is how every incidence of extreme weather is attributed to global warming. More on this momentarily.

Make no mistake:  Global warming is a serious problem, it is largely caused by humans, it could be contributing to such extreme weather events as drought and wildfires, and it might reach a tipping point where it significantly changes weather patterns and ocean currents, resulting in some parts of the world becoming less livable for humans and unlivable for other species unable to adjust or migrate.

(Admittedly, warming has some benefits and is certainly better for life on the planet than another Little Ice Age, but to make that case without being misunderstood or attacked as an idiot is beyond the scope or time frame of this commentary.)

Rush Limbaugh used to say that man can’t change the climate. He also said that he was 99.8% right in his thinking.  Well, he was wrong about climate change.

In today’s binary America, if one side is wrong, the other side must be right. Therefore, if conservative Limbaugh was wrong about climate change, the opposite end of the political spectrum must be right about it.

That simplistic binary view didn’t hold up in the recent coverage of the flooding in Germany and elsewhere, or the drought in the western U.S., or the wildfires in Greece, in Algeria, and in the western U.S. Reporters and featured experts on PBS, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, BBC, DW News, and other non-conservative sources emphatically said that global warming was the cause of these events.

That was a supposition or hypothesis, not a proven fact. And it was said without mentioning other possible causes or putting recent disasters in historical context by comparing their incidence and severity with the frequency and severity of disasters in the past.

Take wildfires in the western U.S., where conflagrations (and drought) have been common events in history. An example was the Great Fire of 1910. Here are excerpts from the U.S. Forest Service’s account of the fire:

No official cause was ever listed for the 1910 fire. But 1910 was also the driest year in anyone’s memory. Snows melted early and the spring rains never came.

By August, normally swift-running rivers had slowed to a crawl and many streams had simply disappeared into bedrock. A bad electrical storm the night of July 15 touched off a large number of fires in North Idaho.

It was one of the largest forest fires in American history.  Maybe even one of the largest forest fires ever anywhere in the world. No one knows for sure, but even now, it is hard to put into words what it did. For two terrifying days and nights [sic] – August 20 and 21, 1910 – the fire raged across three million acres of virgin timberland in northern Idaho and western Montana.

Many thought the world would end, and for 86 fire victims, it did. Most of what was destroyed fell to hurricane-force winds that turned the fire into a blowtorch.  Re-constructing what happened, leads to an almost impossible conclusion:  Most of the devastation occurred in a six-hour period.

By noon on the twenty-first, daylight was dark as far north as Saskatoon, Canada, as far south as Denver, and as far east as Watertown, New York. To the west, the sky was so filled with smoke, ships 500 miles at sea could not navigate by the stars. Smoke turned the sun an eerie copper color in Boston.  Soot fell on the ice in Greenland.

There were scores of other devastating wildfires in the early 20^th century and in the 19^th century, during a time when there was far less population, development and carbon emissions than today. For example, a fire near Edmonton, Canada, burned an estimated five million acres in 1920.

Even Wisconsin, a state not associated with wildfires, had a devastating fire in the drought year of 1871. Known as the Peshtigo Fire, the flames swept through a 60-mile stretch north of Green Bay, Wisconsin, and a 50-mile stretch on the Door Peninsula, claiming an estimated 1,200 – 1,500 lives along the way. Many of those who jumped into the Peshtigo River to escape the flames were reported to have been boiled to death.

The history of wildfires, floods, and other natural disasters is extensive and easy to peruse with a quick internet search. Yet many reporters don’t seem willing to conduct fifteen minutes of research so they can put today’s disasters in historical context or at least qualify their comments about global warming.

Are they lazy? Unoriginal? Not intellectually curious? Or do they have an agenda?  Whatever the reason, the result is that they can’t be trusted, just as climate deniers on the right can’t be trusted.

Also not worthy of trust are those who are silent about the pros and cons of a carbon tax and nuclear power while insisting that global warming can be stopped solely by solar energy, windmills, carbon capture, electric vehicles, all-electric homes, regulations galore, legions of government apparatchiks to administer the red tape, and extensive mining of lithium and other rare earth minerals—or reliance on China for the raw materials, which increases the chances of a military conflict if the Chinese ever wanted to restrict the supply, given the deteriorating relationship between the U.S. and China.

Especially untrustworthy are the hypocritical elites in politics, business, and Hollywood who virtue signal about global warming while owning multiple mansions and flying by private jet.

Joining them are economists who hold that prosperity and a high standard of living depend on never-ending growth in population and material gooIf you dare to suggest that there might be limits to human expansion, economists counter by citing the famous bet of 1980 between economist Julian Simon and biology professor Paul Ehrlich, author of the “Population Bomb.”

Then there are those who deny that humans are causing serious environmental damage in many ways other than global warming, including, for example, the overfishing of oceans, the use of nitrates in industrial-scale farming, the growing of corn for ethanol, the over-reliance on monoculture crops, and the rapid depletion of ancient aquifers.  These deniers can’t be trusted either.

That doesn’t leave many people to trust.

*****
Editor’s Note:  We don’t always agree with everything our contributors have to say.  Heck, we have days when we have trouble agreeing with ourselves. But The Prickly Pear is a big tent of conservative ideas and there is a legitimate school of thought (Bjorn Lomborg is a good example) that thinks mankind is influencing the environment but does not buy into the argument that socialism is the answer. For example, if the sea is rising, build sea walls. That is what the Dutch have done for centuries. That is a proper response if it is a natural change or one induced by mankind. It was a specific and targeted solution, not an arrogant attempt to change the entire climate of the earth and in the process to change the way people live by force. In short, there are cost-effective and freedom-respecting ways of doing environmental policy and ways to engage free enterprise, even if you do believe in anthropomorphic global warming or other man-influenced issues. The point of the following article is that getting a consensus on these issues is difficult because there is a lack of trust.