The concerted effort by fossil-fuel funded propagandists to keep Americans in the dark about our role in climate change has long targeted the consensus, which is why it’s so important to continually reinforce the fact that scientists are nearly unanimous about human activity driving climate change.
That’s the gist of an op-ed that ran on Monday in the Guardian. In the piece, a group of academics, in response to commentary over the summer criticizing consensus messaging, lay out the history of denial’s attacks on science and explained the damaging effects of the gap between what scientists know and what the public thinks they know. Ignoring the fake news about the consensus as opposed to countering it, they explain, further dulls political will to take action.
And it’s not like it’s particularly difficult to debunk denial. On Friday, conservative blogger Mark Caserta did his part to propagate the narrative we highlighted a few weeks ago, writing in an op-ed for the FaWest Virginia Herald-Dispatch that progressives are the real threat to America, not climate change. To back up his assertion, he cites a decade-old blog post by John Coleman pushing the classic conspiracy theory that warming is just a cash cow for greedy scientists. But then Caserta points out “reputable scientists” also buck the consensus, and points to perhaps the single worst example of a “reputable” “scientific” voice: Ken Ham.
For those not in the know, Ken Ham is the biblical literalist who built a so-called museum in Kentucky to show how dinosaurs and humans co-existed at the dawn of Earth a mere 6,000 years ago. Clearly this is someone well-qualified to judge matters of climate change, particularly in relation to the hundreds of thousands of years of paleoclimate records that conflict with his Young Earth creationism.
To be fair, Ham is a creationist focused on religion, not science--he’s far from the best ambassador for denial. A more “reputable” scientific voice than Ham might be Cliff Mass. Mass is a meteorologist who’s proven to be a consistent voice of skepticism, particularly on links between extreme weather and climate change. As can be expected, Mass has been particularly busy this year jumping to distance climate change from the rows of extreme, record-breaking weather events we’ve had in a few short months.
In a piece about him in the Seattle PI that ran Thursday headlined “Climate change is real but…”, Mass criticizes the linking of climate change and extreme events. While he acknowledges that warming amplifies many events, his statement that there’s “absolutely no reason to believe” an unusual ridge of high pressure off the west coast has anything to do with warming is simply false--there is. So besides his problematic borderline misogyny, it’s clear Mass has missed out on some key facts.
It’s hard to say if the skepticism Mass expresses is motivated by ideological factors, like Ken Ham’s denial, or just scientifically misinformed, like those who watch too much Fox and Breitbart.
But you know who hasn’t been subjected to decades of misinformation and propaganda on climate? The Latino community. Yale polling last week showed that Latinos are far more worried about climate change than non-Latinos. This is particularly true for non-English speaking Latinos, which could be a testament to the prevalence of English-language Murdoch media and its power to distort.
And it makes sense they'd be concerned, given the stark difference between how the Trump Administration handled warming-amplified storms that struck Texas and Florida, and the one that hit Puerto Rico.
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