Listen up, because the latest National Climate Assessment (NCA) was released this week! For those who are unaware, the NCA is a massive federal government report summarizing the state of climate science so that policymakers can make informed decisions about the fossil fuel pollution and other human activities changing the climate.
Overall, the findings are concerning, to say the least. Of course, that's not how the liars in denierworld portrayed it — if they mentioned the report at all.
Let's take a look at how the few deniers that did actually pay attention to the report handled this comprehensive and authoritative review of thousands of peer-reviewed studies.
The Washington Examiner focused not on the report at all, but on President Biden coughing for 10 seconds while talking about the issue. Very serious reporting. Same goes for The Washington Free Beacon: the headline there wasn't about coughing, but instead rehashed a classic disinfo narrative, attempting to generate outrage about how the president flew in a private jet to meet Chinese head of state Xi Jinping. (Biden and Xi reached a promising climate agreement during their meeting.)
Elected Republicans, meanwhile, opted to "ignore" the climate report, per E&E News coverage of a House hearing criticizing an EPA power plant rule.
As for the people who at least pretended to pay attention to what's in the report, Roger Pielke Jr. complained that his work wasn't cited and spun a conspiracy theory about the NCA being "payoff" from the Biden administration's replacement of a Trump-era appointee. He also falsely conflated real scientists at NGOs who worked on the NCA with the disinfo peddlers of the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute, and Exxon, even revealing that he would trust a staffer from Cato, a industry-funded lobby shop, to lead the report.
On the actual substance of the document, Pielke took issue with its findings on billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, again conspiracizing: "Things that make you go hmmm[.] Curiously, climate change is causing the strongest increase in disasters that just get over the $1 billion dollar threshold[.] Also curious, the sharp increase in little disasters occurred right when NOAA started promoting the B$ disaster timeline."
Why would it be curious for NOAA to talk about the increasing frequency of billion-dollar disasters after an increase in billion-dollar disasters? Pielke's so high on his own supply that he sees conspiracy where there's a much more obvious answer: things got worse, and people talked about it.
The Daily Caller made a whole story out of quotes from Pielke, just one of two they ran on the NCA.
The other story was just anti-Indigenous racism, with the article attempting to argue that because the NCA also incorporated Indigenous knowledge of fire management, ecosystem health, and reforestation, it is therefore somehow unscientific.
By and large, disinfo producers tend to try their hardest to ignore authoritative climate reports like this. But when they don't, it's the same story: deny it, cry about it, politicize it, and when all else fails, mock minorities.