Yesterday we tried to warn you about expected disinformation around COP26, and today we’re coming at you with the freshest piles of denier BS.
For example, a Koch/Heritage guy in the Koch/Heritage Daily Signal wrote that one of the big three things people should know about about COP26 is that “the American people do not support Biden’s plan to waste taxpayer dollars on an international climate change slush fund.” Now, while obviously a “slush fund” is never going to poll very well, there actually does happen to be recent polling on this issue of international climate finance, thanks to Yale/GMU’s team, and it turns out that two thirds of Americans “support providing financial aid and technical support to developing countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions,” and 61% support funding for developing countries to adapt to climate change.
And Bjorn Lomborg is flogging his latest WSJ column, this one misrepresenting the link between wildfires and climate change. Lomborg uses a decline in global wildfire burn acreage to claim there’s no climate change connection, but here’s what the actual scientists have said about it in the recent past: “The decline in global average area burned has indeed been misused to support false claims numerous times. There is strong evidence that the increase in fire activity we are seeing in many forested regions is indeed linked to climate change.”
Lomborg uses last year’s wildfires as an example of climate over-reach, but again, actual scientists see it differently, because they actually do science. World Weather Attribution’s rapid analysis found that the fires were made at least 30% more likely because of climate change, while warming is driving the sorts of weather conditions that fires love.
Dumb as those attacks may be, they’re far more sophisticated than what may have been yesterday’s biggest, and perhaps stupidest, attack on the COP26: President Biden closed his eyes for half a minute during a speech!
Feeding directly into the rightwing meme of “sleepy Joe,” (sort of) popularized by Trump during the election his supporters went on to attempt to overthrow via violent insurrection, Washington Post reporter Zach Brown tweeted a clip where Biden “appears to fall asleep during COP26 opening speeches.”
Now, given the obscure and little-known concept of “jet lag,” combined with the mind-numbingly boring nature of basically every opening speech ever, it wouldn’t be surprising if Biden did fall asleep. But, as Brown implicitly acknowledges with his “appears” language, did Biden actually fall asleep? As the Independent then “reported”, did Biden actually “nod off”?
Well there’s certainly no indication of his head actually falling down to his chest or really much of any nodding at all in the brief clip. And when an aide comes to his side, Biden’s eyes immediately open again and he doesn’t at all appear like anyone who’s just been startled awake during something they shouldn’t have slept through (not that we’ve ever seen anyone or been the one to actually “nod off” in a meeting after a long night of partying intercontinental travel).
While neither the deniers at CFACT nor the conspiracy hubs of ZeroHedge (who noted MSNBC covered it, which… they didn’t need to), Fox News (who lazily compiled rightwing tweets) nor Gateway Pundit even tried to verify the “news” that the President didn’t have his eyes Clockwork-Orange-peeled open, the crack team of political propagandists reporters at the New York Post actually did some research for its write-up. Specifically they counted just how long the President closed his eyes: once for seven seconds, then again for an additional twenty-two seconds.
Yes, they all wrote stories about the President closing his eyes for a combined twenty-nine seconds.
We’re just relieved Biden didn’t close his eyes for a full thirty seconds, or they might have written instead about how he “appears” to have died!