Post-IPCC, Deniosphere Reduced To Incoherent Sputtering (When It Wasn't Ignoring The Whole Thing)
Links at original.
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The latest IPCC report came out yesterday, and deniers appear to be caught flat-footed by the “unequivocal” findings of human responsibility for climate change and fossil fuels' responsibility for the increasingly devastating extreme weather events we’re seeing burn down or flood communities around the world.
Outlets you might expect to be ready and raring to go with some counter messaging seemed instead to hope that if they ignored the climate report, it would go away. Breitbart didn’t appear to cover the IPCC at all yesterday, but did find some time to put up a picture-based story about the Dixie fire in California that “both-sideses” the climate connection. Fox, meanwhile, was mad that the Pentagon doesn’t want its soldiers needlessly infected with a debilitating and dying for no reason, while the Daily Caller was suddenly very interested in sexual assault allegations (against Cuomo).
The conservative outlets that did address it, however, clearly hadn’t bothered to take the time to read it (or even the coverage of it) and create anything new or specific to the actual report findings. For example, Marc Morano briefly remembered he gets paid to do climate denial, not Covid disinfo, and tweeted a few Climate Depot links with indecipherable tinfoil-hattery. But his big headline post was just a BBC story, with a 200+ word sub-heading in all bold (but different fonts and sizes) that ends with a quote from Morano, that itself referenced and linked out to a past post about a previous IPCC report and Al Gore.
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Over at Watts Up With That, the reaction was similarly disorganized, consisting mainly of a discussion thread in which Anthony asked his crack readership for their help crowdsourcing lines of disinformation for future blog posts (and perhaps his quote for Heartland’s press release.) He’s drawing a salary from Heartland, but apparently can’t be bothered to come up with his own ideas… Ditto for the Wall Street Journal, which simply repeated itself with a Bjorn Lomborg op-ed last week casting doubt on the disaster-climate link, and a Gerard Baker column yesterday. Just like an editorial they also published downplaying the report, Baker repeats the Journal’s mantra that Steven Koonin says climate alarmism is misplaced, and laments that the “modern journalist” aspires to “be part of the expert class, to identify as a member of the cultural elite,” apparently unaware of the irony of saying that, while being the former Editor-in-Chief and the Editor-at-Large at the cultural elite institution that is the Wall Street Journal, the outlet named for the literal epicenter of elite expert financial institutions.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/8/10/2044876/-Deniers-Struggle-To-Equivocate-An-IPCC-Report-That-s-Unequivocal-About-Climate-Change#view-story
