I’m adding a new feature to the blog called the Countup to Meltdown™. Once a month we’ll see how many headlines were published that mentioned Global Warming or Climate Change and compare the numbers against tallies from previous months. I’ll also compare those numbers against the headlines that mention Proof or Evidence along with Global Warming or Climate Change to determine if there’s any actual confirmation that Man is responsible for global warming.

Data will be compiled by searching the news.google.com site. The Advanced News Search criteria will be set to search for news headlines published during the month. The search strings will include the following terms:

• Global Warming: allintitle: “global warming”

• Climate Change: allintitle: “climate change”

• Proof of Global Warming: allintitle: “global warming” proof OR prove

• Proof of Climate Change: allintitle: “climate change” proof OR prove

• Evidence of Global Warming: allintitle: “global warming” evidence

• Evidence of Climate Change: allintitle: “climate change” evidence

My assumption going into this is that the media is hyping global warming. There’s no solid evidence that humans are responsible for climate changes, yet it seems as though the media is publishing more stories each month that blame the United States, President Bush, and Western Civilization for causing it. Most of the journalists who write those articles are liberal and probably sympathize with the environmentalists and politicians promoting the climate change “crisis,” so they’re quite willing to provide a constant barrage of doomsday reporting.

What I expect to see in the following months is that the media will publish even more stories, no matter how flimsy or contradictory the facts they contain may be (case in point: the forests help fight global warming and forests make global warming worse stories published in November) until the public’s interest dwindles. If the stats I collect show that the headline count is leveling off or dropping, it’s a sure sign that the media was unable to keep people interested and have moved on to some other topic du jour.

Of course, if something changes the routine, like a researcher actually proving that humans are making the planet warmer, there’ll finally be a basis for the media’s hysteria and then thousands of headlines will trumpet the news. So while the Countup to Meltdown is intended for entertainment, there are a lot of ways the numbers could go and we could spot some subtle trends.

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