After months of record highs worldwide and weeks of of unseasonably warm temperatures stretching all the way from Canada to the North Pole, the dreaded polar vortex looks poised to return and finally deliver winter to much of the nation. Your holiday weather advisory includes mendacity in the US capital, as senators and reps will arrive with snowballs in hand announcing the end of the very climate change they’ve long denied was happening.
While traditional media struggles with the right way to call out lies and whoppers, Trump people have now moved on to saying there are no such things as facts in our gleaming new, post-truth world! Which makes you wonder why the so-called House Science Committee still bothers to shadow box with quaint notions based on some ancient mystical device called a thermometer:
On Thursday, the committee’s Twitter account hopped on this anti-climate-science bandwagon. It tweeted a link to a story titled “Global temperatures plunge. Icy silence from climate alarmists” that was published by Breitbart—the hard-right, white-nationalist-supporting news outlet that saw its chairman, Steve Bannon, become President-elect Donald Trump’s chief strategist.
Yes, the committee got hosed by a dingbat at an alt-right—aka white supremacist—website, and no they don’t seem to care about either the lack of accuracy or the nasty company they’re now openly keeping. But the House pseudo-science committee wasn’t alone; the dingbat(s) in question simply fudged and made up data, then reported it as if it were real, and more than a few news-y organizations got suckered in.