Aaaiii! Ph’nglui Mglw’nafh Alterman R’lyeh Wagn’nagl Fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!

Eric Alterman on how our alarmist, liberal media run around like Chicken Little shouting, "the Globe is Warming!" Not.

Global warming, hot air - Altercation - MSNBC.com

We know from previous reporting that it is a concerted Republican strategy to sow false doubt in the minds of Americans about the phenomenon of global warming so that their campaign contributors and political allies may continue to destroy the earth’s ecosystem without inconvenience. To do this they must deny the reality of Global Warming, by serving up mountains of bul**it. Here is one Frank Luntz memo about how they planned to do it. One thing I learned at Sundance watching Al Gore’s film was that a study has been done of the available scientific literature on the current state of scientific knowledge. The scientists gathered up nearly a thousand peer-reviewed articles that purported to examine the issue and picked at random, ten percent of these to read. They found a grand total of zero actually challenged the existence of the phenomenon. Yet when they did a similar percentage study of mainstream media, they found right-wingers had been so successful in their campaign of disinformation that 53 percent (I think) of the articles written about global warming called the scientific data into question. This is how “working the refs” works and demonstrates why the kind of contentless reporting promoted by the likes of “The Note” is part of the problem. When sources lie, they lie too; and they don’t even bother to discern the truth of the matter because it only matters what their sources tell them. (Remember that’s Judy Miller’s excuse—and Joe Klein’s.) Anyway, look at these two stories: Global warming may soon be irreversible, portending incredible catastrophe, here, and the Bush administration is censoring and silencing top climate scientists at NASA, here, because they prefer to allow the danger to continue unabated, for matters of political convenience. And by the way, call me “shrill,” but I call that “evil.” (Read this article for background if you haven’t yet had a chance to educate yourselves about the process.)

As I said in an earlier post, I'm baffled by wingnuttia's refusal to listen to scientific fact regarding climate change. Well, not baffled, since I've seen innumerable instances of lockstep, knee-jerk assent to whatever Dear Leader and his minions proclaim. But aside from perhaps scaling down from a Lincoln Navigator to a Prius, or maybe taking public transit every now and then, I can't fathom where wingnuts get the notion that paying attention to how we humans affect the zoosphere is somehow satanic.

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