Any of you wish you had this job, covering fake news, calling out problems in real news and exposing the funding trails behind propaganda? Well you’re in luck, because CNN is looking to hire a reporter to cover fake news, with a job description that’s basically a denier roundup, writ large. Cool to know that we were some five years ahead of the curve here!
No doubt whoever gets the gig will be busy, because the freshly minted Trump presidency is poised to be the administration least tethered to objective reality. Even before Conway coined the term “alternative facts”, and the Trump White House distorted figures on climate regulations, Politico Magazine had a couple of must-read pieces on this. One details the psychological toll of Trump’s Lies vs. Your Brain, covering much of the path we’ve been cutting here for years, but in the sadly relevant context of our newest president. The second piece is much more simple- a debunking of the 82 verifiably false things Trump said in the mere 71 days between election and inauguration. (And he didn’t stop there, as the Guardian fact-checked his inaugural speech.)
But you’re here for climate, not news about fake news. As we predicted, here’s both: the Wall Street Journal’s latest climate editorial tries to dispute the announcement that 2016 was the hottest year on record. (As does their fellow fake news opinionator, James Delingpole at Breitbart.) The Journal’s criticism rests on two main points. First that it only narrowly beat out 2015 and El Niño played a role in that warming, and second that the warming still isn’t as extreme as models predicted.
On the first point, yes, El Niño played a role. But as Carbon Brief shows quite clearly (courtesy of Tamino’s prior work on this), when you remove the influence of El Niño, 2016 is still the hottest on record. On the second point, whenever deniers reference “models” having failed in their “predictions,” it’s important to ask them which models, and which model runs, they’re relying on to make that claim.
Because as we’ve discussed before, models make projections based on a set of assumptions. And different models make different assumptions to ask and answer different questions, based on different datasets. But deniers mix and match however they’d like to support their denial, which is why their “proof” of this debunked claim is never to be found in a peer-reviewed journal. Studies that are peer-reviewed tend to confirm model validity.
Of course that hasn’t stopped deniers from repeating their attack on models, from those who run fake news blogs and outlets like the WSJ’s opinion pages to those running the Trump administration.
Here’s a long-shot idea: someone legitimate should assemble the various model runs, and then show them to President Trump so that he can judge them himself. Like a pageant. But before you present him with the graphical output of the models, be sure to let him inspect the raw data and get a look at those models in their barest form.
We know he likes that.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories:
‘Don’t get in our way’, US mayors tell federal government on climate change
Trump to environment: This is war
In Beijing, and Washington, a Breath of Foul Air