GOOD NEWS ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT IS NO NEWS

"Much good news about contentious environmental issues is regularly kept quiet by regulatory agencies, activist groups, and the media. Why this is so is the question we have continually asked ourselves after closely examining the most recent scientific research behind three of the most important contemporary environmental debates in the United States: the health of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest, global warming, and the impact of hog farming on water quality in coastal North Carolina.

The good news is that there is plenty of good news. The bad news is that hardly anyone is reporting or discussing it, so that the public continues to believe in environmental crises that are nonexistent. Because such crises often result in new laws, policies, and regulations-and thus have widespread and lasting effects on our communities and economy-we ignore the blackout on good news at our peril.

Salmon

In August of this year, President Bush visited the Ice Harbor power dam on the Snake River to celebrate the strong Northwest salmon runs of the last two years. Salmon numbers in the Columbia River Basin have lately been the highest in four decades. Salmon fishermen in northern California celebrated the Fourth of July (and record salmon hauls) by giving their fellow citizens free salmon.

Environmentalists, however, were horrified by the presidential visit. They have been trying to get the Ice Harbor dam (and three others) breached. They have said the dams caused the recent decline in the Northwest salmon population, and that despite the recent recovery, the dams must still be breached to protect the long-term stocks of a fish that is second only to the American eagle as an environmental icon.....

Last May, however, a federal judge ruled that the federal plan for salmon recovery was inadequate, because it did not include breaching the dams. Neither the National Marine Fisheries Service (which designed the plan), nor any of the seventeen environmental groups suing to get the dams breached, mentioned the twenty-five-year salmon cycle to the judge. The Fisheries Service did not want to lose its funding for salmon recovery, and the eco-groups did not want the judge to know that the dams were basically irrelevant to salmon numbers.

This long-known natural cycle has been kept secret for years now. We first reported it in 1999, in a column that went to more than four hundred Knight-Ridder-Tribune newspapers, and was published by perhaps a dozen of them. Respected researchers such as Nathan Mantua and Stephen Hare of the University of Washington, and Ted Strub and Harold Batchelder of Oregon State University, have been writing about salmon co-variance for more than five years in respected journals such as Oceanography and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Climate change

On November 16, 2001, the journal Science published an elegant research report, done by unimpeachable scientists, recounting the earth's temperature history for the past 12,000 years. The report directly linked Earth's changing climate to the variable behavior of the sun. Dr. Gerard Bond and a team from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York (and affiliated with Columbia University) compiled the report titled, "Persistent solar influence on North Atlantic climate during the Holocene."

Science gave it star treatment. The magazine's Richard Kerr wrote, in that issue, Paleo-oceanographer Gerard Bond and his colleagues report that the climate of the northern North Atlantic has warmed and cooled nine times in the past 12,000 years in step with the waxing and waning of the sun. "It really looks like the sun has mattered to climate," says glaciologist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University, University Park. "The Bond et al. data are sufficiently convincing that [solar variability] is now the leading hypothesis" to explain the roughly 1,500-year oscillation of the climate seen since the last ice age, including the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century, says Alley. . . .

The research implies that global warming has nothing to do with the activities of mankind. This scientific bombshell was almost totally ignored by the media, despite the favorable comments in Science, which journalists watch carefully for news. In fact, an Internet search revealed that not a single publication other than Science and American Outlook reported the Bond research.

Why the selective reporting?

These instances amply demonstrate that the public is too often given only one-sided, simplistic, pessimistic versions of environmental realities by the news media and even by our government agencies and researchers. The reasons why are fairly simple and obvious: money and power. For the news media, bad news sells. It doesn't take a genius to know that a newspaper with a scary headline will sell far more copies than the paper declaring, "Nothing Bad Happened Yesterday, Tomorrow Looks Great!" It is a basic fact of human nature.

For our regulatory watchdog agencies, bad news means huge increases in research and staff funding. The amount of dollars spent on climate change research and watchdogging is billions higher today than before the threat of human-caused climate change was postulated. Likewise for environmental groups, whose donations and memberships skyrocket with these crisis campaigns".

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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