The New York Times provides a textbook case of how the alarmist media distort the public dialogue by simply making something up and then repeating the lie endlessly as if it were a fact. In this case, the New York Times on June 19 published a sensationalist story titled, “With More Storms and Rising Seas, Which U.S. Cities Should be Saved First?” The theme of the article is global warming is hammering U.S. cities worse than ever, and is bankrupting national, state, and local governments because of the costs of escalating extreme weather events.
The Times set the tone of the article right out of the gate, with the article’s lead sentence stating, “As disaster costs keep rising nationwide, a troubling new debate has become urgent: If there’s not enough money to protect every coastal community from the effects of human-caused global warming, how should we decide which ones to save first?” The article then discussed the pros and cons of sending more disaster relief money to, say, Virginia Beach versus New York City.
But what about the opening six words of the article? The Times asserted, “As disaster costs keep rising nationwide…,” but the article provides absolutely no documentation for the claim. Instead, it merely states as a fact that disaster costs keep rising. The implication, of course, is that climate-related disasters keep getting worse. And then the article uses the assertion as justification to claim cities are competing for limited funds to deal with the growing costs of a crisis.
We at CFACT can think of a pretty good reason why the Times did not provide any documentation for its assertion; because the assertion is simply false. A prevarication. A canard. A fib. A fable. A fabrication. A flat-out lie.
University of Colorado scientist Roger Pielke Jr. has shown that weather disaster losses as a percentage of gross national product are in decline during the past 30 years. Moreover, utilizing another measure for climate catastrophes, Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Marlo Lewis points out that climate-related deaths have declined dramatically during the past century.
Climate-related disasters are not getting worse. Perhaps with a growing population, a growing amount of wealth, and more people building expensive houses on the coasts, the same extreme weather events that have always occurred may rack up higher costs than in the past, but climate-related disasters are neither getting worse nor having a worsening impact relative to gross national product.
Cross another asserted climate scare off the books….
that global warming is ba Times set the theme of the article right out of the gate, with the lead sentence of article stating, “