Media Matters created a video mosaic of the dumb bunnies at Foxaganda spouting nonsense on global warming. Nonsense and, of course, simultaneously the company line.
Phil Plait at Salon joins the smackdown:
The moment I saw the first few seconds I was chuckling ruefully. I’ve known for years that the term “climate change” was in fact promoted by Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who suggested using it because it’s less “frightening” then saying “global warming.” But as usual, facts won’t stop the talking heads at Fox News, who claim it’s a liberal term. I like how Media Matters (who created the video) put the actual clip with Luntz in at the end.
Ironically, Luntz has a point, though not the one he meant to make. The increase in heat trapped by greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t just make things hotter. It changes weather patterns, and can create droughts in one place and flooding in another. Over a long enough time, it will in fact change the climate, so the term is actually correct.
The cavalcade of nonsense continues in that video, with several claims that the Earth is cooling—errr, no, it’s not—and more. The one that always gets me is how deniers somehow think that global warming means no more cold weather and no more snow. Ironically, global warming can increase snowfall, because warmer air can hold more moisture. The average temperatures are increasing, but it still gets cold in winter, so we still get snow, and in some places there’s more snow to fall.
Climate change, climate chaos, global warming, global weirding. What's in a name? Obviously, switching to "climate change" didn't get the subject more mention by candidates during the 2012 presidential campaign. Didn't give it more time in the traditional media.
For the 240 or so global warming deniers in the U.S. Congress, the label sure doesn't matter. They're determined to block any action that might reduce the growing impact of global warming, to ignore the likes of say, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who speaks on the floor of Senate on the subject every week. Not to mention Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Barbara Boxer of California, who in February introduced legislation to do something about global warming: Climate Protection Act (S. 322) and Sustainable Energy Act (S. 329).
Those two bills have made it to the Senate Environment and Public Works and the Senate Finance Committee, respectively. Because Sen. Boxer chairs the environment committee, the Sustainable Energy Act at least will get a hearing, though its chances of actually emerging from committee are slim.
Some on the left will shrug and argue that talking and introducing global warming legislation is a waste of time anyway because that big cohort of dim bulbs in the Senate and House who get a big laugh out of the Foxaganda anchors and guests will just stand in the way of legislation. Whether the blockers truly believe that cold winters in Montana mean global warming is liberal fakery instead of scientific fact or they're part of the band of Koch-marionettes that is motivated out of pure greed into denying climate change doesn't matter, say the shruggers. With these naysayers in the way, nothing dealing with global warming will pass Congress anyway, so why bother?
Shrugging is always bad strategy.
Progressives, liberals, leftists, whatever the preferred label, ought always to be proposing policy that they would enact if they had the clout to get it enacted. One key ingredient of gaining that political clout is to show voters over and over again what you would do if you had the congressional votes, the political clout to do it. You persuade those voters to give you the clout.
While decrying the buffoonery and Kochfakery of the right-wing climate change-deniers, every Democrat in the Senate ought to be speaking up every week the way Whitehouse does. They ought to be signed on as co-sponsors of the Sanders-Boxer legislation. But they're not.
It's easy to mock the Foxagandists and the Republican deniers in Congress. But action is what's needed. The senators and representatives—most of them Democrats—who say they accept the scientific evidence of global warming but aren't proposing anything to deal with it or sign up with those who are making such proposals, are no better than the dumbasses who think climate change is a hoax.
Delay is denial.