CNN Searches for Climate Cause of Wildfires, Predicts ‘Century of Fires’ Due to Warming

By Paul Detrick | October 24, 2007 | 12:35 PM EDT

The hills of Los Angeles are burning and the media keep finding reasons to blame global warming.

CNN found a way to work global warming into its reporting on a national tragedy on October 23.

During “Anderson Cooper 360: In the Line of Fire,” CNN’s Tom Foreman even looked into his crystal ball to predict the future by warning of a possible “century of fires, just like what we're seeing now” as a result of global warming.

Foreman cautioned viewers that, “greater periods of rain” that fuel “increased vegetation growth” over the next century may provide a “potential link between these fires and global warming.”

Video: Windows (2.57 MB), or MP3 audio (335 kB).

Earlier in the broadcast Cooper also plugged CNN’s documentary:

At the top of the next hour, as I said, the big picture. These fires are really a piece of it. Fire, drought, global warming, climate change, deforestation, it is all connected, tonight, 9:00 p.m. Eastern…‘Planet in Peril’ starts in just 30 minutes.

But was there a source refuting the claims that global warming was to blame for the fires in California? Nope. Not one.As Brent Baker pointed out on October 23, “NBC Nightly News” also tried to link global warming to the California fires that night.As the L.A. punk band Bad Religion said with their single, “Los Angeles is Burning,” chronicling wildfires during 2004: "And I cannot believe the media Mecca, They're only trying to peddle reality, Catch it on prime time, story at nine, The whole world is going insane."

Paul Detrick

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