I use Yahoo! for my Internet Explorer homepage, so I can't help but notice the four to six most important news stories at any given time, according to Yahoo! I've been meaning to comment on this before, but has anyone else noticed a distinct liberal bias?
Currently on the Yahoo! homepage, we learn Insurers: Climate change may cost $150B. That's right: may cost. So is this news? Clicking through, we find the article was written by an Environmental News Service correspondent. Who are they? I don't know, but here's the first paragraph:
Climate change is causing natural disasters that the financial services industry must address, a group of the world's biggest banks, insurers and re-insurers warned Monday. They estimated the cost of financial losses from events such as this summer's devastating floods in central Europe at $150 billion over the next 10 years.
So climate change is responsible for this summer's flooding in Europe. Europeans were right to blame America and its lack of support of the Kyoto protocol for the European flooding.
In the third paragraph, we learn who's behind this "group of the world's biggest banks, insureres, and re-insurers":
A partnership between the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the financial institutions, known as UNEP Finance Initiatives commissioned the report. It shows that losses as a result of natural disasters appear to be doubling every decade and have reached $1 trillion in the past 15 years.
Who would have guess that an organization like the UN was behind this?
Further down, we are reminded of the Bush admininstration's lack of support for the protocol:
The [Kyoto] protocol, agreed under to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, limits the emission of six greenhouse gases linked to global warming. Thirty-nine industrialized nations were to have been governed by the original agreement signed in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, but the Bush administration said in 2001 that the United States would not ratify the protocol, and Australia followed suit this summer. It still has not entered into force.
Actually in July 1997 by a 95-0 vote, the U.S. Senate urged the Clinton/Gore Administration to reject the Kyoto Protocol. The senate refused to ratify the treaty long before Bush was president.
Yahoo! will post on their homepage any news article that supports environmental causes, including information that is re-released old news or a "study" that confirms nothing. Yahoo! thought the top news piece yesterday was the biased New York Times poll that supposedly shows public support for war with Iraq is down, and Yahoo! did not seem to think a French tanker explosion this weekend off the coast of Yemen was news. I'll be keeping an eye on Yahoo!
UPDATE: Read commentary on the New York Times poll from Dick Morris and The Weekly Standard.
UPDATE 2: Read more on the lack of news being reported in regards to the environment from TechCentralStation.
UPDATE 3: What remarkable timing I have. At 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time (the original posting is stamped 2:36 p.m.), Yahoo! switched out the climate-change insurance story and replaced it with Report: Over 11,000 species face extinction. This time it's a Reuters story promoting a World Conservation Union press release.
