Climate More Crucial Than ISIS? Fox News Ridicules

It is not news that supposedly "fair and balanced" Fox News has an agenda. Its loyal viewers will take offense at our saying that, but those who typically get all their news from this one source, where there is a lack of opposing views to bring up a little contrast, tend not to see that agenda.

So it's occasionally useful to demonstrate that the various Fox News readers and opinion purveyors are stage-managed from on high. When in a given day they all say the same thing, it is not a coincidence, and that is made all the more apparent by how often it happens.

Case in point: Obama in Paris at the climate summit. Fox News policy is to ridicule the notion that climate change is a problem and question whether it even exists. So on the first day of the conference, the word came down from on high to go after Obama for spending time on climate change when there are terrorists abroad in the world and for treating climate as the larger problem. Below we offer that one day's example of how Fox orchestrates the news with everyone on the team following conductor Roger Ailes, the head of the Fox News branch of the Rupert Murdoch empire:

Happening Now, a late morning and early afternoon news program. Guest is Gerard Baker, the editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal.

Anchor John Scott, quoting Obama:

"He said, 'It's hard to come up with a bigger problem than climate change', when people are being slaughtered, heads are cut off and so forth. I wonder if the average person out there sees that as the burning issue of the day."

Baker:

"Yeah. It lacks urgency. There's no question … the problem of Islamic terrorism is a much, much more serious and urgent and pressing problem."

Before continuing, our view is that there is always something more pressing, but action to forestall climate change has already been postponed past the point where many are persuaded that we are too late. ISIS is a scourge that must be destroyed, but it is temporal. Just as movements come and go and nations rise and fall and the world moves on, so too will ISIS be defeated or will collapse. Ridding the world of the barbarians will cost time and lives, but ISIS is not permanent.

But climate change is — at least for many human lifetimes to come. So of course climate warming is the far greater threat. Unless deniers can prove it is the hoax they claim, the defensive assumption has to be that it could permanently affect the entire planet with potentially disastrous consequences. But the folks at Fox seem incapable of thinking beyond today, and they want us to go along, near-sighted, fixed on the present, averting our eyes from the future. To continue:

Outnumbered airs at midday. Four women, some permanent, some rotating, play host to a male guest, always right-leaning. Program regular Sandra Smith:

"Speaking just a few miles from the site of the November 13th terrorist attack in the French capital, the President suggesting that climate change is a greater threat than terrorism. Listen."

President Obama:

"The global threat of climate change could define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other."

Smith:

"Well, that lit up the Republican campaign trail where candidates slammed the President."

Clips are shown of Carly Fiorina saying, "Sadly Hillary Clinton and President Obama are both delusional", followed by Chris Christie saying "For the president to be over there" (at a climate change conference, need we mention) "talking about climate change quite frankly is insulting", and Donald Trump on Instagram, "While the world is in turmoil and falling apart in so many different ways, especially with ISIS, our president is worried about global warming. What a ridiculous situation".

Guest panelist Rachel Campos-Duffy, who as a television personality originally from the MTV reality series 'The Real World' qualifies as a climate expert for Fox, gives us her view:

If you are a died-in-the-wool community organizer collectivist, this is the #1 problem, and make no mistake, this whole conference is not about science. It is about big government, giving more power to the U.N. It's about decreasing free enterprise. That's what this is about".

The Five, a late afternoon gabfest co-hosted by Eric Boling and Greg Gutfeld. Boling opened with:

"According to President Obama, we've got ISIS contained, terror isn’t the world's biggest threat, it's climate change, so let's battle the weather with all our might. Our commander-in-chief talking today about a very dangerous enemy we need to slay. Well, the future of the planet is at stake, Mr. President. It's threatened by jihadism, not the weather."

For co-host Gutfeld, the climate issue is even the cause of terrorism. See if you can make sense of the following: Gutfeld:

We should throw it right back at them. Climate hysteria actually causes terror. For example, activism is fueling a war against coal…There are a billion people on this planet who are not on the electrical grid. They are living in poverty burning impure fuels. That makes them vulnerable to the desperate move into cities where they aren't wanted, i.e., they end up becoming fodder for terror machines. By preventing these people from getting cheap fuel, you're actually making them vulnerable to terror, so in a sense it is his climate conference, it is his climate hysteria, that is leading to terrorism…Obsessing over climate change during the time of ISIS is like shaving your legs while you're on the Hindenburg".

Yes, he did say that. The program then showed the President speaking earlier that day at the Paris Climate Conference. Obama:

"This summer, I saw the effects of climate change firsthand in our northernmost state, Alaska, where the sea is already swallowing villages and eroding shorelines; where permafrost thaws and the tundra burns; where glaciers are melting at a pace unprecedented in modern times. And it was a preview of one possible future — a glimpse of our children’s fate if the climate keeps changing faster than our efforts to address it. Submerged countries. Abandoned cities. Fields that no longer grow. Political disruptions that trigger new conflict, and even more floods of desperate peoples seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own".

Boling:

"Sorry Mr. President, arctic ice is not actually melting, it's actually growing, and by the way, how are all those warmers going to explain the 19-year pause in temperatures?"

Spreading falsehoods comes naturally to Boling, as he does as well on his Saturday morning show, "Cashin' In", but that apparently plays to what Fox viewers want to think. First, Obama was not speaking of Arctic ice, he was talking about Alaska — its glaciers and melting permafrost. But as for Arctic ice, in 2014 it had receded to its 6th ost reduced extent in the satellite record. Perhaps Boling's idea of growing is that its extent wasn't as bad as the 5th lowest.

As for "the 19-year pause in temperatures"? Boling was careful to trim two sentences from what the President said leading into the above quote: Obama:

"14 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since the year 2000 and 2015 is on pace to be the warmest year of all".

We can add as well that 2014 had set the record. Temperature rises have not "paused".

The Kelly File: She said that because the President characterized the climate summit as an act of defiance just two weeks after the terrorist attacks, Obama's comments have led to questions about his priorities. She shows a clip in which the President's deputy national security adviser was pressed by a reporter to rank the greater threat, terrorism or climate change.

Rhodes:

"They're both critically important and we have to do both at the same time, and they pose different threats. Obviously, there is an immediate threat from terrorism that has to be dealt with to protect the American people. I think over the long term clearly we see the potential for climate change to pose severe risk to the entire world. I'm not going to rank them because they're different."

The camera returned to a look of condescension on the face of Pete Hegseth, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran and CEO of Concerned Veterans for America which for Megyn Kelly equips him to speak about climate change.

Kelly:

"He doesn't wasn’t to rank them, Pete"

Pete speaks about Obama rather than Rhodes. Hegseth:

"He's declined to rank because he knows when it comes off his lips how absurd it sounds. He's already ranked them...Climate change is the perfect enemy for President Obama. There's no face, there's no moral distinction, whether it's hot, it's cold, you're always fighting. No bullets involved and the solution is automatically more big government, big international schemes...They know how absurd it sounds but they're ideologically on the left committed to climate change. "

Kelly:

"He can't rank them. Really? He can't put the importance of defeating ISIS above climate change? The American public is squarely opposed to them on this. Terror is #1 in terms of importance to the American people [24%] and climate change [in a squeaky voice and gesturing] is way down here [3%]".

Ah, yes, those spot-on Americans 42% of whom don't believe in evolution and think God created humans in their present form.

Hannity is Sean Hannity's program that airs at 10pm weekdays. He opened by talking to guest and presidency candidate Mike Huckabee about Obama's "head-turning remarks", referring to this:

Obama:

"I've come here personally as the leader of the world's largest economy and the second largest emitter to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it"

Hannity:

"It's almost like an obsession this president has with apologizing for the country. When you heard his remarks today, and how out of context they were in terms of the progress we have made in spite of him, what was your reaction?

Huckabee:

You know, Sean, I sometimes wonder, what country did he grow up in? Because the one I grew up in seems like such a different place. When he said that we have contributed to this problem, I think, what problem?

Huckabee then launched into a strangely irrelevant philippic about the jobs mining for coal and drilling for oil and gas have brought about in the U.S. and how much America has contributed to the world. This he evidently meant as justification for our 5% of global population having for decades produced 25% of the carbon pollution.

Mission accomplished after a good day's work of bending the viewers' heads around to the Fox News preferred take on the world.

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