Author Mark Hertsgaard “went to Capitol Hill on a mission: to confront the climate cranks who still refuse to accept what virtually every major scientific organization in the world, starting with our own National Academy of Sciences, has concluded: man-made climate change is real, happening now and extremely dangerous.”
Hertsgaard, author of Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, says: “We spoke with a number of leading deniers, most notably Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma. Inhofe had no response when asked why his Republicans are the only major political party in the world that still denies the science behind climate change. Instead, he said his scientists knew better than the overwhelming majority of scientists who say climate change is real and dangerous. Later, a leading public relations official for energy companies told us ‘the science doesn’t matter.’”
In his article “Climate Cranks Gin Up the Right Wing Noise Machine” (Huffington Post, February 21, reposted with the permission of the author) Hertsgaard writes (read full text here):
The right-wing media machine is a large part of the reason why denial of climate change persists in the United States long after the rest of the world has acknowledged the problem. Over the past few days, I’ve gotten a close-up look at how the machine works, because I’ve been its target.
Last Tuesday, February 15, I went to Capitol Hill on a mission: to confront the climate cranks who still refuse to accept what virtually every major scientific organization in the world, starting with our own National Academy of Sciences, has concluded: man-made climate change is real, happening now and extremely dangerous.
I also wanted to highlight a fact I have often marveled at during my twenty years of writing about climate change in books and for leading publications around the world, including Vanity Fair, Time, The Nation and most recently Politico. That fact is: virtually every major political party in the world — except for the Republicans in this country — accepts this mainstream scientific conclusion.
Yet the average American would not know this is the case. Why not? Because discussion about climate change in the U.S. is dominated by how the issue is framed by politicians and the media in Washington. And inside the Beltway, denial of mainstream climate science is regarded as a legitimate opinion rather than as an unfounded oddity. …
So, accompanied by members of the Sierra Club and Generation Hot — the two billion young people around the world who have been condemned to spend the rest of their lives coping with the hottest climate our civilization has ever known — I went to Capitol Hill to call the cranks to account and urge my colleagues in the rest of the media to do a better job of presenting the scientific truth about climate change. …
It didn’t take long for the right-wing media machine to start its attack. …
In “Climate change: GOP Galileo moment” (Politico, February 15, reposted with the permission of the author), Hertsgaard writes (full text here):
U.S. news coverage usually refers to climate deniers as skeptics. That is misleading. Skepticism is invaluable to the scientific method. But an honest skeptic can be persuaded by facts. These deniers are largely impervious to facts — at least facts that contradict their worldview.
When virtually every major scientific organization in the world, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and its counterparts in 18 other industrial countries, has affirmed that man-made climate change is real and extremely dangerous, only a crank would continue to insist that it’s all a left-wing plot.
What, are all these organizations and the thousands of scientists associated with them part of a vast conspiracy? Are they all lying careerists or incompetent buffoons? That is the only logical conclusion to draw from the Republicans’ continuing insistence that climate science is bogus. …
Yet if one judged solely by recent [U.S.] media coverage, one would think that the deniers have a point. In an embarrassing display of political gullibility and scientific illiteracy, news organizations have repeatedly played into the deniers’ hands …
There is no point trying to change the climate cranks’ minds. For economic as well as ideological reasons, they will no more acknowledge the truth of man-made global warming than the 17th-century Vatican would concede that the Bible was not literally true.
The rest of us, however, can change how we relate to the cranks. …
Earlier posts:
Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth
Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists