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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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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