Science
Manufacturing Immediate Fear of Climate Change

Manufacturing Immediate Fear of Climate Change

A new subdivision of climate-change research known as “attribution science” looks to link current extreme weather events to long-term global warming. ...
James Murphy

The images are just too good to pass up. A rain-soaked journalist, his wet hair plastered against his face as he struggles to stand against a fierce wind, reporting from a hurricane-besieged coastal city. Another reporter wearing hip waders, standing in a flooded street, laments the coming cresting of a river. An exhausted, soot-stained fireman pours his heart out during a long-overdue break fighting wildfires in California. A wide shot of the hot sun bearing down on brown and dusty cracked soil, foreshadowing what global warming will ultimately bring.

These scenes of disaster — real or staged — have become common whenever the mainstream media reports on extreme weather while connecting the disaster to the scourge of anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming, which is now referred to more generically as climate change. Any significant or extreme weather event is now hailed as proof of man-made climate change.

During the recent coverage of Hurricane Florence, many media outlets went even further than that. The Washington Post editorial board went so far as to claim that one man — President Trump — was somehow complicit with the extreme weather and that his actions were, at least in part, responsible for the destruction the storm wrought.

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