Wannabe dictator

 Fox "News" does it again --- lies.  

Oh, the irony.

By Fiona Katauskas

Life After Tucker

 By Fiona Katauskas

(If you didn't know, the cartoon refers to the sacking of Tucker Carlson, far-right host on Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch)

Fox News contagion

 By Mike Luckovich

Long term asset class returns

This chart is from an interesting article in The New Daily, an Australian newspaper which was started by union super funds to counter the pernicious influence of the Murdoch Press.

Note that this is the total return, i.e., includes rents and dividends.  If you own your own house, you would obviously not get a rent return, but on the other hand, you would have saved yourself the rent you would have paid.  Note that the returns for less risky/less volatile investments, such as bonds and cash are over the long term much lower than from the riskier/more volatile investments.  Also, observe that the returns over these 96 years for residential property and shares are practically identical, but there are long periods, sometimes decades long, when they diverge.  Finally, the chart is drawn using a log scale. 

Subsidising newspapers

 This is an oldish report from Inside Story.  But the points it makes are still relevant.

The idea that governments should provide financial assistance to news publishers is receiving more serious consideration in Australia than at any time in living memory. At the heart of the Senate inquiry into the Future of Public Interest Journalism, established in May in the wake of another round of lay-offs at Fairfax, lies the question of government’s role in ensuring a “viable, independent and diverse” news media. During the committee’s hearings – and in submissions it has received – some form of public subsidy is figuring prominently among the potential answers.

The reason is straightforward enough. Australia has lost between 2500 and 3000 media jobs this decade. That’s a quarter of our total journalistic capacity. Advertisers have left for Google, Facebook and other non-journalistic vendors of eyeballs, and they’re not coming back. Subscriptions to news outlets are growing but even non-subscribers enjoy the benefits of public interest journalism – liberal freedoms, democratic participation and low corruption. That means public interest journalism is unlikely to be privately purchased in the kind of quantities a healthy democracy needs.

And yet, as Matthew Ricketson, professor of communication at Deakin University and key player in the 2012 Finkelstein Review, told me, “I think if you asked the average person in the street, should the government provide money to the media, and put it like that, they’d probably be wary about it. Because they’d be worried about control and editorial interference.”

Ricketson is no doubt right. We don’t even need to accost people on the street. A submission to the Senate inquiry by libertarian researcher Chris Berg articulates exactly this anxiety. Arguing against state support for individual firms and journalists, Berg claims that the “real or perceived political interference, or just funding decisions that favour particular sides of politics, would undermine their democratic function.” Berg imagines an unsustainable conflict of interest in which “government planners would have to support organisations which are specifically dedicated to countering the planners’ interests, and would have to do so in a way that does not affect the political balance of the industry.”

In outlining this case, Berg makes no reference to the experience of any country in the world where subsidies already exist. And for good reason: the international evidence flatly contradicts his position. The five countries that topped the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index in 2017 were Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands. All five provide direct subsidies to their newspapers (typically targeted at publications with weaker market positions). Lest the conjunction of state support and press freedom be dismissed as a Scandinavian curiosity, consider the finding of a 2014 policy brief from the London School of Economics. Of ten countries where governments provide direct assistance to their news industry, only Italy has any issues in relation to press freedom – and it still generally ranks in the top third of press freedom indices.

Senators and observers need only review the very comprehensive appendix to the submission of the Journalism Education & Research Association of Australia (itself an updated version of Annex K in the Finkelstein Report) to see just how widespread subsidy systems are. As well as the Nordic countries, Austria and the Netherlands provide annual direct subsidies. The Dutch government also offers loans and loan guarantees to support new media start-ups. The French employ a suite of measures, including subsidisation of transport, distribution and communications, a digital innovation fund, and tax incentives for journalists and publishers. Newspapers in Britain are exempt from the value added tax, normally levied at a rate of 20 per cent. A dozen other European countries, including Germany, Italy and Ireland, also provide a total exemption or significant reduction in their VAT.

That Berg didn’t feel the need to explore evidence from any of these countries is a symptom of the prevailing assumptions of our political culture. In Australia, we have taken it for granted that there would be something fundamentally dubious about governments handing over cash to newspaper owners. And yet this practice is as accepted in other parts of the world as it seems strange to us.

Internationally, subsidy regimes tend to be around half a century old. They have endured as governments have changed and power has oscillated between left and right, and they generally enjoy broad support across party lines. Josef Trappel, head of Communication Policy and Media Economics at the University of Salzburg, told me that “there is support for these kinds of subsidies almost across the entire political spectrum” in his country. “The strong parties in Austria, which are basically the Social Democrats, the Conservatives, the Freedom Party and the Greens – they are convinced that public subsidies for the press are a good thing.” It’s hardly the kind of consensus that would exist if governments were using subsidies to favour friends and intimidate opponents.

Robert Picard is one of the world’s leading academic experts in the field, dividing his time between the Reuters Institute at Oxford and the Information Society Project at Yale. “What we have been able to show in studies over the last four to five decades now,” he told me, “is it is possible to fashion subsidy mechanisms where the discretion to give the money is taken out of the hands of the existing government.” There are two critical elements in the design of subsidy schemes that protect them from abuse. The first is that subsidies are disbursed by a body that’s at arm’s length from the government of the day. Typically, it’s an independent statutory commission, but in Belgium, for example, the responsibility is delegated to an industry organisation. The second feature is that subsidies are allocated according to explicit and objective criteria, meaning that even the independent body has very little discretion.

In these respects, press subsidies tend to work in much the same way as the election funding provided through the Australian Electoral Commission, which makes its allocations according to first-preference votes received. As with election funding, we shouldn’t be complacent about the possibility that public assistance to the news industry could be abused. But like election funding, we have every reason to be confident that the risk can be managed satisfactorily. As well as Picard and Trappel, I spoke to media scholars in Denmark, Sweden and Britain. None could think of an example of an allegation of subsidies being used by governments to intimidate or favour news organisations – or the appearance of such.

It turns out that news publishers can accept support from the state without compromising their independence. The freest media in the world are subsidised by the very governments they hold to account. There’s nothing to stop the Public Interest Journalism Senate committee – chaired by Labor’s Sam Dastyari with the Greens’ Scott Ludlam as deputy – from concluding that subsidies don’t harm democracy.

But do they do any good? The answer to this question is more complicated, partly because it raises another: good for what? In the twentieth century, the newspaper industry was swimming in cash. The problem was a tendency towards monopoly – so subsidies worked if they increased diversity and competition. In the twenty-first century, newspaper companies, big and small, are losing revenue and shedding the journalists vital to a healthy democracy. Whether subsidies can do any good in response to this problem is the question everyone is asking.

Sweden is widely regarded as having one of the most successful subsidy schemes in the world. The Swedish Press Subsidies Council oversees subsidies for newspaper distribution and digital development, and what are called operational subsidies – annual payments targeted to the weaker players in news media markets. To qualify for the subsidy – which is funded by a tax on advertising – a print or digital newspaper needs to be published at least once a week, meet a minimum circulation requirement and, critically, have less than 30 per cent market share. The paper also needs to be at least 51 per cent original editorial content (and the more there is, the greater the subsidy). The subsidies constitute only 2–3 per cent of total industry revenue but typically amount to between 15 and 20 per cent of revenue for the weaker titles that are their main beneficiary. For some, the subsidy can amount to as much as a third of total earnings.

Sweden introduced its subsidy system in 1970 after two decades in which a net sixty newspapers had gone out of business. While there were local factors at play, this was an instance of an international phenomenon: the strong tendency towards monopoly in twentieth-century newspaper economics, memorably described by Warren Buffett as “survival of the fattest.” The “fattest” newspaper in a market enjoyed highly advantageous economies of scale and was the most attractive to advertisers. Over time, thinner rivals were driven out of business. In most Western countries, the total number of newspapers, newspaper proprietors and cities where two newspapers competed all sharply declined over the course of the twentieth century.

The Swedish government’s intervention mitigated against this trend by tilting the scales in favour of the second and third newspapers in each regional market. On the eve of the global financial crisis, Sweden – a country with a population of fewer than ten million people – had seventy-eight daily newspapers and the same number of weeklies. There were five geographical markets with separately owned newspapers, and a further ten where there were two competing newspapers owned by the same company. (Recall that the test for receiving the operational subsidy revolves around producing original editorial content, not being independently owned.)

How much credit the subsidies deserve for this happy state of affairs is a matter of scholarly debate. Affluent and highly literate, the Swedes have always had remarkably high rates of newspaper readership. (Historically around 75 per cent of adults reported reading a newspaper each day, almost twice the percentage in countries like Australia and Britain.) The strong tradition of “political parallelism” – close alignment between newspapers and political parties – has probably helped smaller papers stay in business. These factors are important, but few question the role of subsidies in the remarkable diversity and vitality of the Swedish news industry.

Yet it’s also the case that subsidies have not spared the Swedish news industry from the problems associated with collapsing advertising revenue in the digital environment. The Swedish Newspaper Market During the 21st Century, a report delivered to the Swedish government this year, describes how “the newspaper industry is not employing as many people any more, and the number of local editorial offices has decreased.” Total industry revenue has declined to levels not seen since the 1980s, and where five cities had separately owned newspapers a decade ago, now there are none. “What has happened,” Lars Nord from Mid Sweden University told me, “is that second-ranking newspapers have in many cases been bought by the leading newspaper and merged into one newspaper company, sometimes with two different titles and sometimes with one single newspaper.” The last remaining city in Sweden with separately owned newspapers was Karlstad. The city’s two newspapers announced a merger in January.

Perspective is important here, though. The same report describes a level of ownership concentration, nationally, that Australia – with its duopoly controlling 90 per cent of the market – would love to have. “The eight largest newspaper groups,” the report explains, “now control seventy-six out of Sweden’s ninety-three mid- and high-frequency daily newspapers.” That’s right, the eight largest newspaper groups have a combined 82 per cent market share.

The Swedish case makes it clear, if it wasn’t already, that subsidies aren’t a silver bullet. The problem of lost advertising revenue is orders of magnitude greater than any existing subsidy solution. In Sweden, state support amounts to less than 3 per cent of total industry revenue; advertising has traditionally accounted for two-thirds of revenue. So the question Australia should be asking is not whether industry assistance is going to be the solution but whether it can be part of it. Josef Trappel suggests that “the composition of revenue in the future might be a certain kind of mosaic of different elements. And I think one piece in that mosaic can and should be subsidies. It should not be the most important one. It should not be the only one. It should not be the dominant one. But it can help.” He observes that “in those countries where there are subsidies, newspapers are doing better than in others.” Isolating the effect of state support, amid all the variables at play, is as challenging as it is important. But, on the face of it, there are grounds for believing that appropriately designed subsidies make a difference.

See also this academic paper on the Swedish example

The best thing about competitive newspaper subsidies is that it will reduce the influence of this man.

Fox "News" isn't news at all

 

NewsCorpse unbiased? How we laughed!

 From a tweet by Kevin Rudd, a former Labor Prime Minister of Australia.  Australia is in the throes of a federal election campaign.

Crunching the numbers on the front pages for the first 2 weeks of the campaign, the Murdoch Bias Tracker shows stunning results. But Murdoch's CEO insists there's no bias at all!

Putin's mouthpiece

 A cartoon by Nick Anderson

NewsCorp: from denialism to delayism

 From RenewEconomy

Have you heard the good news? One of the key institutions holding back climate action in Australia – Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation – is suddenly on Team Climate Action! Today, the Sydney Morning Herald revealed that the company’s Australian outlets are set to launch a campaign urging “the world’s leading economies” to embrace a target of net zero emissions by 2050; to be fronted by columnist Joe Hildebrand. The details aren’t out yet, but I contend that we can comfortably predict what it will look like.

It will be a centrist, pro-business approach to climate action. It will make a show of dismissing the “hysterics” of climate activists, while urging governments, including Australia’s, to set distant, meaningless and non-binding climate targets. It won’t allow any room for emissions reductions in line with the 1.5C goals or the Paris agreement; no short-term meaningful targets or actions such as those highlighted in the IEA’s recent ‘net zero’ report. It won’t argue for a coal phase-out by 2030, or the end of all new coal, gas and oil mines in Australia, or a ban on combustion engine sales by 2030-2035; all vital actions if Australia is to align with any net zero target.

It’ll champion controversial technologies like CCS and fossil hydrogen. It’ll highlight personal responsibility: tree planting, recycling and electric vehicle purchases. It will not propose or argue in favour of any new policies; at least none that might reduce the burning of fossil fuels.

How can we know all this before we’ve seen the actual campaign? It’s easy – let me explain.

Here’s a remarkable statistic for you. In the month of August this year, global media coverage of climate saw its highest volume since the December 2009 Copenhagen climate meetings. That’s partly down to the release of the IPCC’s AR6 Working Group one report into climate change, six years in the making.

That report reiterated something extremely important: every single tonne of carbon dioxide does damage. Actions must be immediate and aggressive to align with the most ambitious pathways. Delay is deadly.

During the Black summer bushfires of 2019-20, I did a few interviews about Australia with baffled and perplexed international reporters. “What is going on over there? Why did the people elect such a climate laggard?”. A key part of my response was to pin blame on Australia’s media industry. Mostly on News Corp, which dominates the country’s uniquely concentrated media landscape, and which is notorious for its heavily politicised climate views. In fact, a recent study quantified this in historical terms, analysing media coverage within Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia for its climate science accuracy.

By a comfortable margin, News Corp’s Daily Telegraph and the Courier Mail scored the second and fourth worst among every media outlet analysed between 2005 and 2019 (The Australian wasn’t included in the analysis). Australia has, in general, seen the least accurate climate science coverage from 2013 onwards, despite a general rising trend in scientific accuracy over the past decade. For a decade and a half, News Corp lied about climate science with the blatant aim of protecting the revenue streams of the fossil fuel industry, and protecting its political allies.

This is important as a historical study, but today, it’s increasingly irrelevant. As the study points out, the accuracy of climate science has essentially plateaued in media coverage, with outright denial consigned to the dustbin.

The authors highlight that “the terrain of climate debates has shifted in recent years away from strict denial of the scientific consensus on human causes of climate change toward ‘discourses of delay’ that focus on undermining support for specific policies meant to address climate change”. The fundamental goal is the same – staving off action – but the way it manifests is very different.

There are many substantial recent examples of this. A good one was the severe blackouts that spread across Texas in February this year, which were immediately blamed on wind power failures, alongside easily debunked claims that snows and ice were blocking solar panels and freezing up wind turbines in Texas and around the world.

This isn’t climate change denial: it’s “mitigation denial“. That is, a move away from denying the problem exists and towards decrying its solutions as utterly unacceptable. An important part of this performance is pretending to have a moment of having seen the light, but then continuing to commit the same acts of delay as before.

What might reasonably seem like a surprising change of heart in News Corp’s stance on climate is actually a long-term tactical shift that has been occurring for at least a few years. Whatever policies they failed to destroy through their earlier campaigns, they will try and reframe through racist, nationalistic, technocratic and pro-business frames.

Whatever policies they can delay or destroy, they’ll simply keep running scare campaigns about, insisting that ‘the balance isn’t right’, and that the threat of climate action is greater than the threat of climate change, as they always have (in Australia, News Corp’s partnerships with Google and Facebook mean these campaigns to destabilise climate action are growing more powerful and more harmful every day). When the next federal election comes around, the “COSTS OF NET ZERO” scare campaigns will ramp up in Australia as they are in the UK, and News Corp will be at the forefront, pleading that acting too fast will cause catastrophe. Absolutely mark my damn words: this is what will happen.

Net zero by 2050 isn’t enough. We’ll know that the denialism has truly ended when organisations like News Corp treat the IPCC’s latest report like it’s real. That is, when they acknowledge that every additional unit of greenhouse gases causes harm to life on Earth, and that actions to stop their release must be as fast as possible. That climate change is an emergency that requires rapid action to wind down the fossil fuel industry in a just and equitable way, and that its replacement must be grown to full size with just as much passion and urgency.

This campaign won’t look anything like that. We know what it will look like – and it won’t be anything surprising at all.

Now they tell me

 A cartoon by Mike Luckovich

Newscorp and Murdoch

 From Climate Action Australia

Rupert Murdoch & Brexit

Welcome to the future

Climate denialists are still out there, still spruiking their dotty denial of basic science.  But Exxon knew about the risks of global warming way back in 1982.  And proceeded to fund denialist websites, politicians, and stinktanks.  Their disgraceful lies and propaganda were then picked up by the hate-for-hire politicians and the toxic sludge of right-wing media, such as the Murdochcracy.   So successful have these malignant low-lifes been that there are still some ordinary folk who believe that the science isn't settled (it is) and that transitioning to a carbon-free economy will cause economic collapse (it won't, whereas inactivity on climate will).  But Exxon's scientists got it exactly right.  They forecast that CO₂ would reach 415 parts per million (ppm) by 2020 (the highest in 3 million years.) And it has.  They forecast the consequent global temperature rise of 0.9 degrees C.  And we reached that in 2017.

Next time someone tells you that the models haven't correctly predicted global temperatures, point out that the earliest model, by the scientists at an oil company, got it right.

From Climate Denialist Crock of the Week (Peter Sinclair)

For the record, here's what actually happened to the temperature since 1970:

Source: NOAA

Only 3%? Actually, none.

Denialism by country.
Source: The NY Times
Note that the 3 worst countries are where the Murdochcracy operates.

From Quartz:

It’s often said that of all the published scientific research on climate change, 97% of the papers conclude that global warming is real, problematic for the planet, and has been exacerbated by human activity.

But what about those 3% of papers that reach contrary conclusions? Some skeptics have suggested that the authors of studies indicating that climate change is not real, not harmful, or not man-made are bravely standing up for the truth, like maverick thinkers of the past. (Galileo is often invoked, though his fellow scientists mostly agreed with his conclusions—it was church leaders who tried to suppress them.)

Not so, according to a review published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology. The researchers tried to replicate the results of those 3% of papers—a common way to test scientific studies—and found biased, faulty results.

Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, worked with a team of researchers to look at the 38 papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the last decade that denied anthropogenic global warming.

“Every single one of those analyses had an error—in their assumptions, methodology, or analysis—that, when corrected, brought their results into line with the scientific consensus,” Hayhoe wrote in a Facebook post.

One of Hayhoe’s co-authors, Rasmus Benestad, an atmospheric scientist at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, built the program using the computer language R—which conveniently works on all computer platforms—to replicate each of the papers’ results and to try to understand how they reached their conclusions. Benestad’s program found that none of the papers had results that were replicable, at least not with generally accepted science.

Broadly, there were three main errors in the papers denying climate change. Many had cherry-picked the results that conveniently supported their conclusion, while ignoring other context or records. Then there were some that applied inappropriate “curve-fitting”—in which they would step farther and farther away from data until the points matched the curve of their choosing.

And of course, sometimes the papers just ignored physics altogether. “In many cases, shortcomings are due to insufficient model evaluation, leading to results that are not universally valid but rather are an artifact of a particular experimental setup,” the authors write.

Those who assert that these papers are correct while the other 97% are wrong are holding up science where the researchers had already decided what results they sought, the authors of the review say. Good science is objective—it doesn’t care what anyone wants the answers to be.

The review serves as an answer to the charge that the minority view on climate change has been consistently suppressed, wrote Hayhoe. “It’s a lot easier for someone to claim they’ve been suppressed than to admit that maybe they can’t find the scientific evidence to support their political ideology… They weren’t suppressed. They’re out there, where anyone can find them.” Indeed, the review raises the question of how these papers came to be published in the first place, when they used flawed methodology, which the rigorous peer-review process is designed to weed out.

In an article for the Guardian, one of the researchers, Dana Nuccitelli points out another red flag with the climate-change-denying papers: “There is no cohesive, consistent alternative theory to human-caused global warming,” he writes. “Some blame global warming on the sun, others on orbital cycles of other planets, others on ocean cycles, and so on. There is a 97% expert consensus on a cohesive theory that’s overwhelmingly supported by the scientific evidence, but the 2–3% of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map, even contradicting each other.”

[Read more here]

Asteroid mitigation

This cartoon comes from The Australian, a newspaper in the far-right Murdochcracy media empire, known for its strident climate denialism.  I wonder how it got past the editor.

How Fox News reports the news

Is this the end of climate denialism?

Front page of The Sun newspaper.  Source: JPratt

From The Guardian:

It’s not always easy to recognise a historical tipping point when you see one, but I believe I spotted one when I walked into my local newsagent last Wednesday and saw the front page of the Sun. Over a map of the world which was coloured bright scarlet, the splash headline screamed: “THE WORLD’S ON FIRE”.

Britain’s biggest-selling daily newspaper was not mincing its words. The subheading on the left-hand side proclaimed “PLANET GRIPPED BY KILLER HEATWAVE”, while the right-hand one announced: “HUNDREDS DIE IN EUROPE AND JAPAN”. And if you were wondering what the cause of all this might be, the accompanying news report carried a quote – just the one – from Len Shaffrey, professor of climate science at Reading University, who said: “Global temperatures are increasing due to climate change. The global rise in temperatures means the probability that an extreme heatwave will occur is also increasing.”

I nearly choked on my KitKat when I read that. Is this really the Sun? The shoutiest outlet belonging to Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who famously characterised climate change as “alarmist nonsense”? Is something happening here?

I think something is, and I think what the appearance of this front page in a rightwing tabloid signals is that the summer of 2018, which is throwing up extraordinary climactic extremes all over the northern hemisphere, from north Africa to the Arctic, is finally puncturing the bubble of so-called climate scepticism, at least in Britain. Let us at once say that it will take a lot more to puncture that bubble in the United States, where unabashed and brazen denial of the overwhelming scientific evidence for global warming is an article of faith not just with Donald Trump, but with the Republican party as a whole.

[W]hat we are witnessing now is a historic shift in the way that the threat of climate change is perceived by the world, from prediction to observation. Remember: from the first report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in May 1990, the whole argument that global warming is a potentially disastrous danger has been based on the predictions of supercomputer models of the climate system; they were essentially the same computer models that forecast the weather up to six days in advance, but were now being tasked with forecasting the climate up to 100 years into the future. So most of the biggest climate change headlines for the last three decades have been based on prophecy, as it were, from successive IPCC reports calculating that unless we cut our greenhouse gas emissions, global average temperatures will rise by four or even six degrees celsius by 2100, and that sea levels will rise by up to a metre by the same date, and so forth. There have been five IPCC reports, and with each one the computer models have been more refined and the predictions more reliable, so the conclusions are likely to be more robust. Yet the uncertainty of predicting the future remains.

These predictions have been the scientific strength of the argument for acting to combat the warming to come, but also, its political weakness. The large degree of uncertainty they inevitably contain has provided the soil in which climate denial has sprouted and flourished, after the issue so lamentably became politically polarised between left and right. It has allowed climate action to be characterised by its rightwing opponents merely as an unnecessary and colossally expensive bet about the future, without overwhelming numbers of ordinary people – voters – disagreeing. This is because for the 30 years that ordinary people have been hearing these predictions, they have not seen anything much to worry them when they look out of their windows.

But observation is different. Seeing things happening around you cannot be gainsaid like predictions can, and in this remarkable summer of 2018, events in the real world have been starting to catch up with the climate models’ forecasts of an overheating globe. Not only has Britain sweltered in the five-week heatwave that finally ended last Friday, record-breaking heat has subjected Norway, Sweden and Finland to unheard-of temperatures – above 32C, that’s 90F, recorded 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Meanwhile in Ouargla, a Saharan desert city in Algeria, a temperature of 51.3C (124.2F) recorded on 5 July is thought to be the highest ever reliably measured in Africa. And so in Japan, and so in Greece, and so in Canada: all over the northern hemisphere, record-breaking heat.

[Read more here]


We're going to get more and more actual evidence (as opposed to theory and models) that global warming is happening, and the pressure to do something about it is going to intensify.  Voters are going to insist that de-carbonisation happens, and as temperatures rise, droughts and floods worsen, and heatwaves become more intense, public concern will increase.  Given that there are technologies which are cheaper than fossil fuels, the shift to a fully de-carbonised economy could happen much faster than everybody now expects.

Peak stupid from the WSJ

The Wall Street Journal used to be one of the Anglosphere's great newspapers, 30 years ago.  Its articles were well researched and often of very high quality.  They assumed their readers were intelligent.  I used to read it with pleasure, even though its political views inclined right.  I remember  being impressed that it had few pictures and plenty of densely spaced text, the exact opposite of the tabloid press at the time, and now.

All newspapers have suffered from the migration of advertising to online forums.  And as revenue has declined, newspapers have had to reduce costs by dispensing with quality journalism.  However, for a paper of this calibre to sink to these lows is quite sad.

A recent paper by Fred Singer shows how far the WSJ's standards have declined.  The writer accepts that water expands when it's heated but nevertheless states that global warming has nothing to do with rising sea levels, because the increase in the Antarctic ice cap has compensated for this expansion.  He uses data from 1915 to 1945 (!) from just one location (San Francisco) to back up this theory.  It's not as if we were in 1818, with limited data!    The old WSJ would never have published this tripe.  Alas, its pages now serve the climate denialism god, as its master Rupert Murdoch requires.

In fact the whole question has been well studied:

Figure – Global sea‐level budget from 1961 to 2008. (left) The observed sea level using coastal and island tide gauges (solid black line with grey shading indicating the estimated uncertainty) and using satellite altimeter data (dashed black line) with thermal expansion and glaciers melting components; terrestrial storage (e.g. dams) partially offsets other contributions to sea‐level rise. (right) The observed sea level and the sum of components.

• Church et al (2011) Revisiting the Earth’s sea‐level and energy budgets from 1961 to 2008, Geophysical Research Letters

The chart of the left shows the different sources of the rise in sea levels.  The brick-red line at the bottom shows how "terrestrial storage", i.e., the increase of water on land, including any "rise" in the amount of ice in Antarctica (it's actually been falling) has offset the effects of the other two factors (thermal expansion and melting ice sheets).  The right-hand chart shows the combination of these factors (red line with pink uncertainty band) compared with actual sea-level rise both from tidal gauges and (in recent years) satellites (black solid and dashed line with grey uncertainty band) and the fit seems accurate.

Yes, the sea level is rising, and yes it's due to the thermal expansion of the ocean and melting of the glaciers and ice caps.  And those in turn are due to rising global temperatures which are rising because the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising because mankind is burning fossil fuels. 

[Hat tip to Climate Denial Crock of the Week (always excellent reading.)  There is also a Guardian article (Yes, EVs are green and global warming is raising sea levels) discussing this WSJ article and another ineffably feeble article in Politico about how EVs pollute more than ICEVs.]

The denialists are getting desperate.  They're also scraping the bottom of the barrel with the "scientists" and "journalists" they use to write their (frankly) feeble rebuttals of the facts of climate change and its causes.

Global Warming Denial ... and Speaking English

The countries where hoi polloi are most skeptical of global warming denial are English-speaking.   Countries where the media are dominated by Uncle Rupe.  Countries where the so-called "neo-liberal", "free market" obsession has taken grip.

Read more here.

Murdochcracy

Guess who's in charge?