Fair and balanced

Pro-life street protesters and global warming controversy — getting a fair shake in the MSM?

Don’t believe it? Check out this New York Times story on pro-life street protesters and this BBC story on global warming controversy. Hat tip: Wesly J. Smith (First Things blog).

From the Times story:

The most repeated anecdotes involve abortions averted. Ms. Anderson recalled what she said was her first triumph. It was the early ’80s. After becoming pregnant with a boyfriend while separated from her husband — and deciding to have the baby despite friends’ advice to abort, she said — she was a single mother with a bumper sticker on her Chrysler Fifth Avenue that said “the heart beats at 24 days for an unborn child.”

One day in a parking lot near her home, Ms. Anderson said, a woman came up to her and said she had been on her way to get an abortion when she saw that simple statement and changed her mind. “There was a 2-year-old in the back seat,” Ms. Anderson said.

At her home in Memphis, Mich., other examples followed: of two girls from Ohio who left an abortion clinic and, she said, told Ms. Anderson that her presence had persuaded them had not gone through with it; of a young man who knocked on her door in the dead of night, after seeing anti-abortion signs in her window. …

Ms. Anderson smiled. “I can’t tell you how many babies have been saved because of abortion protesters outside the abortion mills,” she said. “That’s what it’s all about.”

From the BBC story:

What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth’s great heat stores.

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

Professor Easterbrook says: “The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling.”

So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along.

Read the Times piece. Read the BBC piece.