| |
 COVER STORY
Scare of the Century
The alarms and assertions about global warming have gone reprehensibly too far
JASON LEE STEORTS
But what, oh what, would the earth do without Time magazine?
“Suddenly and unexpectedly,” Time announced in a recent issue, “the crisis is upon us.” Haven’t noticed the crisis? You must not be looking very hard. “The climate is crashing, and global warming [what else?] is to blame.” Time accordingly devoted a special report to saving Mother Gaia. The report is half anti-Republican polemic, half catalogue of global warming’s supposed ills — and none receives greater emphasis than the melting of polar ice. We see a photograph of a polar bear, standing all by his lonesome at the water’s edge, and are told that the poor fellow might drown because “polar ice caps are melting faster than ever.” Later, we learn that “the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft.”
Science magazine has itself been prone to hysteria. The issue that Time mentions contains no fewer than eight studies and articles about the ice caps, and begins with a news story warning that “startling amounts of ice slipping into the sea have taken glaciologists by surprise; now they fear that this century’s greenhouse emissions could be committing the world to a catastrophic sea-level rise.” The policy implications of such reportage are clear, but in case you missed them, Time connects the dots: “Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try?”
The answer is, yes, it may indeed be moral not to try. What is not moral is to distort the truth for political ends — which is precisely what has been done with the ice-caps story. Here’s what you haven’t read.
. . .
To read this article in full, you need to be logged in as an NR / Digital subscriber. You will be automatically redirected to this article after successfully logging in below.
Not a subscriber? It's easy to sign up for NR / Digital or National Review print magazine.
>> Already a National Review print subscriber? Get free access to NR Digital.
|
|
|
|
|
