For all their many, many faults, one thing deniers know well is the value of repetition in public communications. While legitimate scientists are always searching for the newest finding or latest emerging theory, deniers are content to drive the same talking points into the ground.
Polar bears are a good example. Deniers like to claim that warming must not be bad for them, because their populations are growing (since humans stopped regularly hunting them in ‘73). Susan Crockford, zoologist, bone identifier and deniers’ favorite polar bear expert, has built a cottage industry of polar bear pseudo-science. Crockford released a new report on polar bears this week (produced for GWPF), and penned an op-ed in the Financial Post claiming that because “polar bears are thriving,” it “should have meant the end of its use as a cherished icon of global warming doom.”
We’ll put aside for a moment the fact that many climate advocates have moved on from the polar bear to focus on the human impacts of climate change. And we won’t waste your time by diving into Crockford’s report, which provides a rosy picture of polar bear populations. Instead, we’ll remind you of a study from last year that examined the difference between how real science blogs and deniers support their polar bear posts. While legitimate blogs cite peer-reviewed papers, 80% of denier blogs cite Crockford, who has never published a peer-reviewed paper on climate and polar bears. And with this new GWPF report, she still hasn’t.
Speaking of shoddy GWPF reports, James Delingpole is promoting GWPF’s self-debunking Groupthink report this week in a post at the illustrious Breitbart. The title image for the post is Al Gore as ManBearPig, from the 2006 episode of South Park--clearly Delingpole is treating this lengthy report on psychology and science history with the seriousness this level of discourse requires. We’re waiting anxiously for Delingpole’s promised part 2 post on the report, where no doubt we’ll be treated to another timely and topical meme.
Beyond Crockford and GWPF, deniers do occasionally use peer-reviewed literature to prove their point. For example, Holman Jenkins Jr. has a column in the Wall Street Journal this week lamenting how the media failed to cover a study released a month and a half ago, because, per his headline, “Good Climate News Isn’t Told.” His gripe is that because scientific uncertainty doesn’t fit “the narrative” media has about climate, it doesn’t get covered.
Yet Jenkins admits the study was covered by both the Washington Post and quotes from an “exemplary French Report,” which was AFP (Agence France-Presse). AFP is basically Europe’s version of the AP, meaning both stories were widely syndicated. The story was also covered in Fox News, the UK Times Daily Mail, Wired, Scientific American, Inverse, Accuweather, both Ars Technica and Clean Technica, and even what Jenkins would call alarmist climate blogs like Real Climate and ATTP.
But despite this global reach, and apparently because InsideClimate News didn’t report on the study, Jenkins uses it to justify his “narrative” about how good climate news isn’t told.
The study, by the way, was one we talked about back in January, under the headline “New Study Finds IPCC Basically Accurate, Deniers Still Stupid.”
Thank you, Mr. Jenkins, for further confirming this point.
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