USA Today: Climate Science Deniers are Like "Birthers"

usa today global warming deniers

The LA Times and Washington Post aren’t the only major media outlets that are starting to tear into the Republican party and other global warming deniers for their absolute rejection of science. USA Today, which I think has really turned things around in recent years and has some of the best climate change coverage of any major newspaper company, had an excellent editorial on the matter recently, one that compares climate science deniers to “birthers” (the folks who didn’t and maybe still don’t believe that Obama was born in the United States).

“In making the comparison, the newspaper cited both the National Academy’s ‘Climate Choices’ study and their own devastating dismantling of statistician Edward Wegman’s work, which has been a corner-stone corner-card of the climate science denial cult,” Climate Progress’ Dr. Joe Romm notes.

Here’s the intro to USA Today‘s piece:

One way to deal with a problem is to pretend it doesn’t exist. This approach has the virtue of relieving you from having to come up with a solution, spend money or make tough choices. The downside, of course, is that leaky faucets and other problems rarely solve themselves and, in fact, usually get worse if ignored.

Such is the case with climate change, a threat that too many members of Congress, most of them Republicans, have decided to manage by denying the science. That head-in-the-sand approach avoids messy discussions of higher energy prices, but it just got harder to justify.

Exactly.

And here’s the nice bit on the continued support of climate scientists’ findings from leading scientific institutions, followed by the opposite for “leading” climate denial reports:

Late last week, the nation’s pre-eminent scientific advisory group, the National Research Council arm of the National Academy of Sciences, issued a report called “America’s Climate Choices.” As scientific reports go, its key findings were straightforward and unequivocal: “Climate change is occurring, is very likely caused primarily by human activities, and poses significant risks to humans and the environment.” Among those risks in the USA: more intense and frequent heat waves, threats to coastal communities from rising sea levels, and greater drying of the arid Southwest.

Coincidentally, USA TODAY’s Dan Vergano reported Monday, a statistics journal retracted a federally funded study that had become a touchstone among climate-change deniers. The retraction followed complaints of plagiarism and use of unreliable sources, such as Wikipedia.

Yes, that second paragraph is on the report I just wrote about.

The editorial also goes on to discuss other problems with the climate change denial “movement” and key solutions to global warming, namely putting a price on carbon and investing in clean energy projects and technology.

Great work.

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