Climate Deniers Try to ‘Fact Check’ Real Reporting

The local weather deniers are at it once more.

In late December, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative suppose tank, launched what it’s calling a “Climate Fact Check” report. The report, which was covered breathlessly by Fox News, purports to show claims made by “climate alarmists and their media allies” in 2022 that “clashed with reality and science.” (Spoiler alert: all of the “claims” coated are, actually, in step with the scientific consensus. Go determine.)

CEI has a protracted historical past of perpetuating local weather denial—its Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy, Myron Ebell, is likely one of the most high-profile deniers within the U.S.—and this report is not any exception. The report comprises numerous tried-and-true local weather denier techniques to attempt to discredit protection of climate-related disasters in 2022 from shops just like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the BBC. Many of the rhetorical methods are such previous hat that there are complete academic papers and books written them. I received’t break down each false declare, scientific misdirect, and pointless non-sequitur within the report, however listed below are just a few highlights:

• The report says that, as a result of Europe had a megadrought within the 1500s, “before coal-fired power plants, SUVs and cheeseburgers,” the punishing drought it skilled this yr couldn’t presumably be juiced up by local weather change. The existence of dangerous droughts in eras previous has no bearing on the elevated incidence of those droughts due to local weather change now. A rapid attribution analysis revealed in October discovered that local weather change made the drought in Europe three to 4 instances worse.
• “While the New York Times labeled China’s drought as ‘record’ as it was supposedly the most extreme drought since records began in 1865, research reports severe megadrought in China as far back as 1637, amid a period called the Little Ice Age,” the report crows. Again, the existence of significant climate occasions earlier than fashionable document has no bearing on whether or not or not this drought was astonishingly dangerous in context, which it was. The New York Times was being factual by calling it the worst drought on document, since official information of drought in China don’t return to 1637.
• The report claims that “heat waves have dramatically declined in frequency and duration in the US over the past 90 years, per the National Climate Assessment.” That 90-yr determine is telling: increasing the information that far again contains the intense warmth the U.S. skilled through the Dust Bowl, when, because the National Climate Assessment itself explains, drought and damaging land use practices intensified summer time temperatures. If the nice folks at CEI had simply learn the total report as an alternative of cherry-picking a sure set of statistics, they might have seen the conclusion that warmth waves are projected to change into “more intense” throughout the U.S. because the local weather continues to alter.

What’s necessary about this paper just isn’t the unabashed local weather denial, which is previous information, however relatively the way it may function an indication of how local weather denialists might attempt to evolve previous these drained techniques. In the primary web page of the report, CEI singles out $8 million of funding that the Associated Press got last year from organizations just like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, the personal household basis of the founders of Wal-Mart, to arrange greater than two dozen local weather reporting positions internationally. In an interview with Fox News, Steve Milloy, a longtime denier and Fox News commentator, went as far as to name the AP a “propaganda outfit.”

“It’s hard to claim it’s news when you’re being paid to report only one side of the climate discourse,” Milloy stated. (This is a very wealthy assertion coming from Milloy, who, along with holding a place at CEI, has a protracted historical past of getting paid to shill anti-science bullshit for each tobacco and oil companies.)

The previous a number of years have seen an explosion in reporting on the well-funded sources of local weather denial, which turned all of the extra related after Donald Trump acquired elected and commenced placing a few of these darkish money-funded deniers in precise positions of energy (Myron Ebell was Trump’s transition head for the EPA). CEI lists the Heartland Institute, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the International Climate Science Coalition as co-presenters of the report; all of those teams have lengthy resumes of perpetuating local weather denial. These organizations have additionally repeatedly been referred to as out for his or her connections to grease and fuel corporations and different types of darkish cash—multiple times by the very media they’re now making an attempt to accuse of bias due to funding.

Philanthropic funding of stories shops, to be clear, often comes with some type of stringent editorial firewall between the editorial workers and the funding supply. The AP has taken philanthropic money since the early 2010s to fund varied workers positions reporting on subjects starting from faith to water points.

When we requested the AP for touch upon the CEI report, a spokesperson wrote in an e mail that the AP’s reporting referenced by CEI is “factual and based in science” and that the outlet stands by it. “The Associated Press works with a variety of organizations, including nonprofits and foundations, in support of its independent journalism,” the spokesperson wrote. “In all cases, AP is transparent about the source of any outside funding received and retains complete editorial control of all content.”

This report is clearly seeking a “gotcha” second. But there’s a giant distinction between a nonpartisan information group taking cash to report on local weather from the Walton household—which, arguably, would have extra of an incentive to suppress journalism about how consumerism impacts local weather change—versus taking cash straight from unknown benefactors and oil corporations.

In the top, this report and plenty of different denier claims function below the flawed assumption that there’s in some way a bonus to be gained in perpetuating the proper science—that the massive majority of scientists who agree on many years of analysis and research are actually simply trying to line their very own pockets. But there’s a giant distinction between some of the revered information shops on the earth getting a grant to report on a scientific consensus and perpetuating drained previous rhetorical chestnuts that sprung full-formed from organizations fed by darkish cash and oil and fuel pursuits. Someone would possibly need to inform Fox News.