Has the Global Warming Threat Passed? | The American Spectator

Made you look!

Over the last two weeks, parts of the coastal Northeast have experienced sub-freezing temperatures, well before such readings are typical.

In contrast with the occasional 60-degree day one might experience in New York City in January, such uncharacteristically cool temperatures have failed to give rise to plaintive headlines and think pieces decrying the “new normal” of an increasingly frigid planet.

And yet oddly warm winter days will often prompt just that — everything from interviews with young people expressing guilt over enjoying a pleasant winter’s day in Central Park (which I recall seeing in New York media several years ago), to 3,000-word essays explicating in laborious detail how a warmer world will impact (among other things) migration flows, geopolitics, and food prices.

Whether under the cover of straight reporting or in the form of the dreaded “news analysis” increasingly popular in many publications, media outlets often cannot resist stretching an anodyne, anecdotal experience (in this example, the weather) into a tendentious line of reasoning designed to drive a predetermined narrative.

Such ideologically infused reporting elides how the events comprising the human experience tend to sit along a bell curve of probability. To label a weather event a “hundred-year storm” is to correctly acknowledge the difference between infrequency and unprecedentedness; by contrast, citing some outlying, five standard deviations from the mean occurrence as proof of durable “change” insults one’s intelligence.

The “news analysis” format in particular is rife with shaky extrapolations of discrete events into larger patterns of meaning. Publications offering only straight reporting and an opinion/commentary section draw sufficiently clear lines between what is provable fact (or can be reasonably inferred) on the one hand, and the opinions or conclusions which one might draw from such reporting on the other. What “news analysis” pieces — whether anecdotally derived or otherwise — do is short circuit the process by which the reader educates himself and forms an opinion; rather, it presents information — which need not even be particularly compelling, as is often the case with anecdotal experience — and instructs the audience as to how to interpret it.

The proliferation of “news analysis,” which willfully blurs the line between reporting and editorial commentary, is but one contributor to the public’s declining trust in traditional media. How media outlets curate content is another. Deciding what to report, and how to report it, is an often unappreciated factor in what consumers of information are fed as sufficiently “newsworthy.” Reporting can be curated to advance interests or agendas, or be suppressed when inconvenient to approved narratives.

These departures from traditional objective journalism harm us all. Just as a pilot requires reliable instrumentation to navigate the skies, and corporate decision makers use accurate business and financial reporting to make strategic decisions, participants in a liberal democracy need honest reporting to best inform their civic participation as voters and citizens.

Which is all a long way of saying to be sure to bundle up on miserably cold fall days, and enjoy that balmy February afternoon as the gift that it is. Sometimes weather is just weather.

Richard J. Shinder is the founder and managing partner of Theatine Partners, a financial consultancy.

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