If Climate Change is such a lie, why does Fox News have to lie about it so much?
A recent report from The Union of Concerned Scientists found that 93% of Fox News and 80% of Wall Street Journal opinion pages’ coverage on climate change was found to be misleading and inaccurate.
I know this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone with half-a-brain who cares about this subject, though it is important sometimes to address the facts, especially when dealing with something so fundamentally important to our continued existence on this planet.
I’m quite certain I am not the only one who notices that every winter the conservatives at Fox and elsewhere say “what global warming” as they point to some of the wild and increasingly cold winters that have been known to occur in the past 10-20 years, yet they are always dead silent on the issue when the summer rolls around.
I’ve debated with climate change folks and they often have some interesting points to make. Usually vague and typical conservative mischief making, trying to demoralize the argument with sophistry and points that make you say: ‘what are you gonna do.’ Yet ideas like the “Little-Ice Age” are quite easily refutable in today’s climates with Carbon Dioxide levels through the roof, record temperatures on the rise and the planet climate increasingly looking as if it is experiencing a permanent change. You honestly would have to be blind not to see it.
Yet the media continues to do a poor job of handling this. Even PBS dropped the ball recently. They give weight to arguments that have no basis in scientific reality. Media Matters did a study on how to address this “post-truth” world in which we live in and how to deal with deniers who believe in conspiracies and have an interesting lack of science in their arguments for a scientific argument.
Which brings us back to Fox News. What could possibly be going through their heads at this point? I suppose it is much of the same self-told rationalization and sophistry that has them believing that even Mitt Romney is not behind in the polls, even Fox polls, it must be EVERY POLL that is wrong except for the one that still shows Mitt only losing by a few points. It’s a type of denial that tells themselves that everything they’ve ever believed in must not, CANNOT be a lie. Yet facts have an amazing way of calling people liars, and for the past 20 years, conservatism has been coming up flatter and wronger with each passing day. This sort of break with reality was bound to happen, but I digress.
It’s only the future of the planet we’re talking about here. Let’s trust the good people at Fox News who have been shown to be completely inaccurate on a number of issues on a number of occasions, from getting caught believing the LAPD was going to spend $1 billion on jet packs to completely getting facts wrong on political stories. Are these guys even ever right? It’s so bad that Saturday Night Live’s recurring Fox and Friends skit depicts them as brain dead idiots with no fact checkers who are forced to air a correction list at least once per skit. I know it’s just a joke, though when you become known for being wrong all the time and having no integrity to the point that it’s laugh out loud funny, well it’s safe to say you really don’t have much of a reputation as a journalist.
Yeah Climate Change isn’t real because we had a bad winter 2 years ago. Yet when record heat and droughts cause record forest fires, rivers too dry to navigate and starvation, these idiots just talk about something else. They find some other story where government is inefficient, imagine that? Or they find something that sounds plausible but just isn’t. This is echoed across the News Corp journalistic halls as their integrity plummets and the planet warms. All the while their ambiguous arguments give a few idiots out there a laundry list of talking points that take too long to refute with, you know, actual science. The guy rattling off some argument about Carbon Dioxide often doesn’t know what CO2 is. Once I ran into a guy who was pushing this petition of scientists who felt Climate Change was a hoax. turns out, it was just a list of people with PhD not scientists, the list did not ask what their field of study was and did not verify a single name on the list, meaning it could have been people with degrees in theology or social studies or even some idiot following a link from a Right Wing blog. This was the great proof he held up to the enormous body of scientific research that exists today.
ClimateChageGate, or whatever the hell they called it, turned out to be a hoax. Right-wingers claimed to have proof that some scientists were deliberately misleading people with their research. Studies have shown that this also proved out to be an honest mistake, vastly over-shadowed, again, by the enormous body of evidence.
Again, back to the enormous body of evidence. No matter how many little nicks and dings you can put into a body of armor with a hand full of mud rocks, the armor may get dirty yet it doesn’t prevent the truth from walking over to these guys with their mud rocks and skewering them. Yet in this case, it skewers us all!
We’ve wasted so much time letting under a tiny minority of scientists, mostly unrelated to climatology or meteorology cast doubts on a very serious problem. Why did Sci-Fi writer Micheal Chricton need to be a leader against Global Warming? Because credible criticism is in short supply.
Now we’ve seen evidence of a world-wide conspiracy to cover up Climate Change, not to push it. Why are these guys playing so fast and loose with our futures? Well billionaires like the Koch Brothers have money in coal and oil and probably don’t want to think of themselves as destroying the planet. So it’s easier to simply deny it. The Kochs employed one of the few credible scientists who said that Climate Change was blown out of proportion. Turns out, after his study, the guy changed his mind and concurred with the enormous body of evidence.
The time for denial is over.
Climate Change could cause serious social and political upheaval, global war, mass starvation even extinction of life as we know it. I think it’s Time to move from denial to one of the next stages of grief, like perhaps acceptance. What could befall us even if we do take action will be scary for us, terrifying for our children and grandchildren.
That is why it is important to continue to fight for solar and wind power plants in the Mojave Desert. Why it is important to understand some of the new agricultural techniques that are being proposed to absorb carbon. It is important to realize urban farming and reduce our consumption of foods that produce a heavy carbon footprint. It took us decades to learn how to over-indulge ourselves with this environmentally destructive lifestyle, it will take us decades to get out of it. It’s important that we do everything we can, for the sake of our children, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of our souls.
