Carbon dioxide isn't pollution, NewAtlas

Report says plug-in hybrids are almost as polluting as gas-powered cars

The article highlights a report from the European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E) which purports to show that plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) pollute almost as much as internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.

I submitted this comment:

A review of basic chemistry: carbon dioxide is not pollution. It's an essential trace gas, without which there would be no life on earth. No carbon dioxide, no plants. No plants, no animals. Hybrid engine cars emit a lot less actual pollution—carbon monoxide, ozone, sulfur dioxide, etc.—than internal combustion engine cars because they produce propulsion more efficiently. But leftists fudge the numbers to suit their agenda.

Guess which comment didn't get shown?

Leftists don't like it when you don't stick with their narrative and their contrived definitions. Carbon dioxide makes up 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere and is critical to all plant life. Calling carbon dioxide "pollution" is perverse, yet here we are. Leftists pervert words and meanings to promote their fantasies.

The Leftist Lexicon highlights some words leftists have usurped to mean something entirely different.

I chose the image above from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which coincidentally, isn't actually a bulletin published by nuclear physicists. It's a leftist political organization masquerading as a scientific publication. They purposely edit (distort) the image to make it look like coal power plants are emitting a thick pall of dark smoke. Here's another, published by the AP, in an article about West Virginia challenging the EPA's unconstitutional Good Neighbor Plan that requires states to reduce ozone that crosses state lines, which the Supreme Court has stayed pending court decisions. Once again, they distort the image to look like dark clouds of smoke polluting the air.

Here's what the smokestack emissions of a modern U.S. coal plant actually looks like.

Those thick clouds are white clouds of water vapor, not dark clouds of smoke like in Victorian England. U.S. coal power plants have expensive scrubbers that extract most of the pollution from the emissions. Modern technology has done a remarkable job of reducing air pollution.

But that wasn't good enough for leftists. They've decided that the harmless, beneficial carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels is a pollutant, contrary to science.

Leftist Lexicon - Big Lies and Doublespeak

The Big Lie

Adolf Hitler coined the term "big lie" (große Lüge) in Mein Kampf to explain how people could be convinced to believe a gross distortion or colossal lie because they wouldn't believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." He claimed that Jews implemented the Big Lie to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general and nationalist politician Erich Ludendorff who himself blamed Jews and others for a conspiracy that resulted in Germany's defeat and ignoble standing in Europe after World War I. The irony is that Hitler and Ludendorff were promoting big lies about Jews; lies that led to the extermination of 6 million of them by Hitler.

The notion that repeating a lie often enough will transform it in the public's mind into a truth has been attributed to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and other notorious tyrants, but the idea was probably around centuries before them. It appears in the 1869 novel The Crown of Life in a form that may be the basis for the current expression of it.

If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.

Doublespeak – Doublethink and Newspeak 

In his dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell invented the term "doublethink" to describe indoctrination by the totalitarian government to compel people to accept conflicting beliefs as truth, usually contradicting their own memory or sense of reality. He also invented "Newspeak," a fictional language invented by the government to limit critical thinking. Doublespeak, which doesn't appear in Orwell's book, is a modern contraction of those two terms. The doublespeak names for government offices were contradictions of their mission. The Ministry of Love interrogated, tortured, and brainwashed enemies of the government. The Ministry of Peace waged war. The Ministry of Truth distorted history, destroyed historical records that conflicted with their agenda, and generated lies and propaganda to promote their dogma.

Leftist Lexicon of Doublespeak

In a spectacular modern example of Doublespeak—almost as if they were the totalitarian government in 1984—leftists have perverted language to mean things disconnected from their original meaning. Some of the terms are a big lie, like "climate change" (see below), which have been so widely and uncritically adopted that they have become a perverse form of received wisdom, even though they are gross exaggerations that are demonstrably false.

Here's a partial lexicon of leftist terms that mean something completely different to them than the original meaning the rest of us understand:

racist noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

fascist noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

misogynist noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

bigot noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

homophobe noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

Islamophobe noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

xenophobe noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

Nazi noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

Hitler noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

democracy noun: any system designed to let leftists rule, often referred to as "our democracy" (which some of us write as Our Democracy™), means government by leftists. When Republicans win elections, it's fascism (see above) and a threat to Our Democracy™

climate change noun: catastrophic, imminent, human-caused global warming and imaginary disasters from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is now 0.04%, up from 0.03% a couple centuries ago, formerly called global warming

climate denier noun: a pejorative term meant to demean people and conflate them with Holocaust deniers, it means someone winning an argument with a leftist about so-called climate change

A couple more just for fun:

literally adverb: figuratively

ironically adverb: coincidentally

See Steven Hayward's Lexicon of Current Political Terminology for more.

Dramatic Decline of Public Trust in Media

Trust in the media has fallen a lot since the 1970's, when about 70% of Americans trusted them. Now it's around 33%.

See the long-running Gallup poll details here.

Why has trust fallen? The Internet and alternative media has made it easier to fact-check the legacy media. Most journalists and editors lean left politically. What they report and the way they report is influenced by their biases. Not a lot of people knew that in the past. Now they do.

Timothy Groseclose published a landmark study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics quantifying media bias while he was a professor at UCLA, entitled A Measure of Media Bias.

He concluded that the "political quotient"—the degree to which Americans lean one or another on issues—is shifted leftward (he calls it "liberal") by around 20 points, which significantly influences the way they vote. Groseclose went on to publish a book on this bias, "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind."

For a recent example of how a simple, quick check of the facts contradicts the claims in an article on CNN, revealing their bias, see my post "Comedy News Network on Water Crisis in Afghanistan."

Trust in the media by leftists (in other words, Democrats) is still fairly high, which is understandable because it's normal to trust those who have similar views as you, although their trust waxes and wanes according to who is in power, which is pretty funny.

When it's a Republican president or Congress, their trust in the media increases because the media is far more critical of Republicans than Democrats. When it's a Democrat president or Congress, their trust in the media drops because occasionally—rarely, actually—the media will be critical of Democrat leaders.

Republicans don't generally exhibit this oscillating trust because they tend to be better informed on issues, as numerous polls illustrate, and have come to understand the longstanding leftist bias in the media.

What the Public Knows about the Political Parties (Pew, April 11, 2012)

Media Twists a Mother's Heartbreaking Story to Support Hamas

Here is a classic example of why trust in the media has fallen dramatically since the 1970's. This is what they've been publishing this week, this heartbreaking image of an emaciated child.

And this is what the real story is:

The Truth Behind the Viral Gazan Famine Photo

David Collier says:

"There’s another layer of cynicism here. From everything I’ve learned, Mohammed’s mother is simply trying to find help for her child. She’s not hiding the truth. She tells the full story to anyone who asks. Yet every journalist who has spoken to her has made the same cynical decision: ignore the medical reality, strip the context, and turn her child into a propaganda weapon. No one is trying to help. No one is interested in telling the truth. All they seem to ask is: 'How can this image hurt Israel?' — and they build their coverage around that."

David Collier points out that the image has cropped out his brother who is clearly healthy, and that the mother has never claimed her son was starving but is in need of specialist care for a congenital health problem he's had since birth.

The media cynically ignores her real need for her son and uses her as yet another prop to condemn Israel for trying to eradicate the Hamas terrorists, a story that is completely unrelated to what's going on in this poor family.

The legacy media reporting on the Hamas war with Israel tends to promote Hamas propaganda with little, if any, fact-checking, while carefully scrutinizing and contradicting Israel's claims, usually without supporting evidence.

Most people think that Israel started the war, which illustrates their unconscious bias influenced by the way the media reports the conflict. Hamas has been at war with Israel since before 2006 when they were elected as the political leadership of Gaza. They fired tens of thousands of mortars and rockets at Israeli civilians between 2001 and 2023, before Israel invaded Gaza. Israel responded to their constant attacks by building a rocket defense system.

After the large-scale slaughter of Israelis on October 7, 2023, Israel realized that walls, fences, checkpoints, and rocket defense wasn't enough to protect Israelis. Hamas had to be removed; a campaign that continues until Hamas either surrenders unconditionally or is destroyed.

So far, Hama shows no inclination to surrender. They prefer to use their own Arab civilians as both cannon fodder and propaganda to appeal to Western media and their governments to stop Israel because they know they can't win on their own. They are radical zealots whose founding charter declares their intent to obliterate Israel and replace it with a Muslim Arab government "from the (Jordan) river to the sea." They have never wavered from that goal and refuse to accept the existence of Israel, which is a secular democracy that guarantees all of its Jewish (73%), Arab (21%), and other citizens equal rights. Arabs have far more rights in Israel than they do under Hamas (in Gaza) or Fatah (in the "West Bank"). The reason every proposed "two-state" solution has failed is because Hamas and Fatah refuse to accept them. Israel is happy to live peacefully alongside the Arabs in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria, and has made many unilateral concessions to try to promote peace. Palestinian leadership, however, does not want to live alongside Israel, and Hamas in particular has built a vast terrorism infrastructure to continually attack Israel.

Read the 1988 Hamas Covenant to understand why Hamas has never accepted a "two-state solution" and never will. Pay attention to Article Seven, Article Eleven, and Article Thirteen in particular if you don't want to read the whole thing. Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood from which they derive their principles believe that all of modern Israel is part of an Islamic waqf (an inalienable endowment) declared by Allah in perpetuity for occupation by Muslims under Islamic law. They believe that any claim to that land by anyone other than Muslims—for example, by Israel—violates Allah's endowment and is therefore invalid. Never mind that Jews lived on that land for thousands of years before the religion of Islam emerged in the 7th century AD. The 1988 covenant was updated in 2017 to remove some of the antisemitic language and replaced references to "Jews" with "Zionists" but it hasn't changed the fundamental character of the charter.

The United States of America designated Hamas as a terrorist organization in 1997. The European Union designated the military wing of Hamas as a terrorist organization in 2001 and all of Hamas in 2003. The United Kingdom declared the military wing as a terrorist organization in 2001 and all of Hamas in 2021. Many other countries have also designated Hamas as a terrorist organization but the UN refuses to, despite the well-documented record of thousands of indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, even in so-called "peacetime."

Comedy News Network on Texas Floods

 

This is the summer of flooding across the US, and scientists know why (CNN 2025-07-20)

Fossil fuel pollution — alongside other compounding factors — has transformed these months into a time of mounting peril, punctuated by relentless heat waves, rampant wildfires and catastrophic flooding.

“These events are of course much more frequent *because* of human-caused warming,” [climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania] said in an email.

there is absolutely no doubt that climate change, caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases, is making extreme rainfall more extreme.

Mann is the author of the infamous and debunked "hockey stick" study purporting to show that tree rings showed a dramatic increase in temperatures in the late 20th century. He excluded tree rings that didn't fit his hypothesis and applied a statistical method that produced a hockey stick even from random noise. His analytical techniques haven't improved.

Meanwhile the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report tells us:

The SREX (Seneviratne et al., 2012) assessed low confidence for observed changes in the magnitude or frequency of floods at the global scale. This assessment was confirmed by AR5 (Hartmann et al., 2013). The SR1.5 (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2018) found increases in flood frequency and extreme streamflow in some regions, but decreases in other regions.

See section 11.5.2 Observed Trends in Chapter 11: Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate. Most of the contributers to the IPCC reports are biased toward the hypothesis that human CO2 emissions are the primary cause of climate change. They rely almost solely on computer models to support their hypothesis but if you take the time to dig through the observations chapters—measurements of climate and weather—the data generally contradict their model-based hypothesis. I suppose they don't notice the irony that the measured data refutes their computer-generated predictions.

This report in the Journal of Hydrology from July 2017 finds no increase in frequency or magnitude of floods and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data for Texas shows no increase in the number of floods over time.

It doesn't seem to occur to the prognosticators of climate doom that their predictions are contradictory and the contradictions make them look silly; for example "relentless heat waves, rampant wildfires and catastrophic flooding." In other words, they predict more droughts and more rainfall. All caused by humans. Go figure.

Watts Up With That? (wattsupwiththat.com) and its Reference Pages are an excellent resource to fact-check the incessant fear-mongering about "climate" from the predominantly leftist media about weather and climate; for example:

Texas Flood Hysteria: Media’s Climate Blame Drowned by History and Data (2025-07-20)

Comedy News Network on Water Crisis in Afghanistan

For the first time in modern history a capital city is on the verge of running dry (CNN 2025-07-19)

Population growth, the climate crisis, and relentless over-extraction have depleted groundwater levels, experts say, and nearly half the city’s boreholes have already gone dry.

Less than 5 minutes of searching for "Dams in Afghanistan" turns up this:

Water Management Policy in Afghanistan After the Fall of the Afghan Government (tearline.mil)

The root cause of the water crisis in Afghanistan is unique in that it is not a shortage of water resources. Afghanistan is rich in water, with a total of 75 billion cubic meters available. This abundance of water resources also supports neighboring countries. Instead, the intensity of Afghanistan’s droughts are primarily a result of inadequate hydrological infrastructure, decades of infrastructure damage during war and political instability, and institutional failures in water management practices.

The Comedy News Network beclowns itself daily. This is what happens when your staff's minds are so infested with leftist drivel that there is no room for rational thought, healthy skepticism, or even something as simple as 5 minutes of fact-checking.