The Deniers’ Inconvenient Truthiness

From ClimateDepot.com, a leading denier website

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The so-called “ClimateGate” scandal is a dream come true for global warming deniers. In the two weeks since hackers stole more than a decade of emails from Great Britain’s Hadley Climactic Research Unit, thousands of private messages between leading climate researchers have been mined for dirt and relentlessly spun by a network of front groups for Big Oil. The scientists’ emails reveal little more than efforts to grapple with complex data and implacable critics.  But the deniers have found a voice in the media as they proclaim that the case for global warming has been proven a liberal conspiracy and a sham. “Anyone who continues to cite the [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] as representing the ‘consensus’ on global warming is wrong,” crows the industry-funded Heartland Institute on a web page devoted to the scandal. “The IPCC has been totally discredited.”

Most Americans still see solid evidence that the earth is warming, yet polls suggest those views are malleable. In 2002, veteran Republican consultant and framing guru Frank Luntz counseled the GOP “to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the [climate] debate.” Luntz has since distanced himself from this strategy, but that hasn’t stopped junk science and bogus economic forecasts from ricocheting through a vast echo chamber of kooky blogs, “nonpartisan” institutes, and fake “green” and “citizen” groups that are often directly or indirectly controlled by the oil and coal industries. Luntz’s strategy may finally be working. According to polls conducted by the Pew Research Center, the percent of Americans who saw “solid evidence” for global warming peaked in 2006, at 80 percent, and has steadily fallen ever since. As the United States prepares to enter UN climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen this week, only 57 percent of Americans see solid evidence for warming, with just 36 percent blaming it on humans.  Here’s a guide to the dozen loudest components of the climate disinformation machine.

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PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

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