On Wednesday, both NBC’s 3rd Hour Today show and CBS This Morning engaged in climate change hysteria as they touted dire predictions that huge portions of land around the world would be underwater by 2050 and displace hundreds of millions of people. The network hosts all blindly accepted the warnings as true without pointing out that such wild claims have been made for decades without coming to fruition.
“And speaking of climate change, on the flip side of that, too much water actually becoming an issue….rising seas could affect way more people than they previously thought….this is an estimate for 2050, which is only 30 years from now,” co-host Dylan Dreyer proclaimed early in the 9:00 a.m. ET hour for NBC’s Today. “It shows that 150 million people are now living on land that will be below high tide by 2050,” she hyped.
Worried co-host Sheinelle Jones gasped: “Really?” Dreyer continued:
…they say southern Vietnam could be totally underwater. It’s mostly – the research that they did, it doesn’t include the United States, but we can assume some of this information for the United States as well. I mean, think about Miami, think about New Orleans, think about areas that are right on the coast. And people love to live by water.
Weatherman and co-host Al Roker chimed in: “Well, 60% of our population in this country live along the coast….But look at Vietnam, that’s 20 million people who could theoretically be displaced.”
Moments later, Roker increased the fearmongering: “In fact, just last year, the Department of Defense said that climate change is probably the number one threat to homeland security because so many of our defenses and defense facilities are along coasts.”
As the discussion concluded, Jones lamented: “It seems like a bad movie and you see it happening and there’s nothing you can do.”
Missing from the coverage was any acknowledgment that such radical predictions have been pushed for years without actually happening. Just recently, NBC repeated a claim that Washington D.C. could soon be underwater – the same prediction the network made thirty years ago in 1989.
“In this morning’s Eye on Earth, a stunning new report shows many major coastal cities around the world could be underwater by 2050, in our lifetime,” co-host Tony Dokoupil declared on CBS This Morning. Leading off a segment late in the 8:30 a.m. ET half hour, he touted: “Scientists from Climate Central say that means 300 million people would be waterlogged in just 30 years.”
Turning to Bernadette Woods Placky, the chief meteorologist for the climate activist group, Dokoupil feared: “So the original projections were already frightening. Now we have new projections, even more concerning.” Placky asserted: “And this is a nice piece of the puzzle in understanding more about how climate change is really affecting the people, places, and things that we love.”
Later in the conversation, Dokoupil piled on the doomsday predictions: “…if people are displaced, that creates conflicts, that creates wars for resources. U.S. Military involvement could follow.”
Co-host Gayle King remarked: “So now that you’ve scared the bejesus out of us, can you explain simply why is it happening and what we can do?” Placky professed: “So my goal’s not to scare you, it’s to inform you. To inform everybody that this is what we’re looking at if we don’t make changes.”
She proceeded to suggest some of those changes: “And that’s why there’s an urgency to change to cleaner sources of energy, electrify our transport, make for refined ways of working our buildings, our heating and lighting systems, and focus on our farming and our agriculture where we have some opportunities with our soils.”
In response, Dokoupil made a campaign pitch: “I can’t personally redefine our electricity system, but I think what you’re saying is people can vote for people who do.” Placky agreed: “That is one of the ways.” In other words, CBS was instructing viewers to vote for Democrats.
Wrapping up the segment, King recalled an off-camera exchange with Placky: “I thought it was funny when I said, ‘Doesn’t it drive you crazy when he people still don’t understand climate change?’ You go, ‘Yeah, like my dad.’”