The Conservative Apocalypse

The conservative reaction to the meteor that slammed into Russia last week has been truly bizarre, if somewhat predictable. Never ones to miss a chance to knock the “hoax” of climate change, the same people poking fun at a CNN host for asking Bill Nye whether an asteroid flyby had anything to do with global warming are now suggesting, as far as I can tell, that we really shouldn’t worry about rising temperatures because, you know, we could all get creamed with a meteor tomorrow. Apparently every dollar spent to mitigate global warming is a dollar not spent on deflecting a meteor . . . or something. The criticism might ring truer if the GOP hadn’t spent the last generation slashing funding for basic science research or trying to privatize NASA, but the party of creationism has never let logical consistency stand in its way before.

The Wall Street Journal, in typical Journal fashion, can’t let an opportunity to snark about climate change go by:

We’re all for studying the climate and doing what can be done within economic reason to cope with temperature changes. But if it’s catastrophe we want to avoid, maybe the marginal dollar is better spent searching for the space rock that we know is eventually headed our way so we can prevent it.

First of all, the Journal is certainly not “for studying the climate” or coping with temperature changes. Otherwise, it wouldn’t publish open letters from “scientists” using cherry-picked data and specious arguments to claim that, uh, temperatures aren’t rising at all. It wouldn’t denigrate every investment in clean energy as a Solyndra-level debacle. Second, only to right-wing budget hawks would a dollar spent on climate change mitigation be seen as a dollar not spent on safer skies. Do we cut money for cancer research because more people die of heart attacks? Here’s a proposition the Journal never seems to consdier: Maybe the marginal dollar of tax cuts for the wealthy are better spent searching for space rocks. After all, mansions get flattened by meteors just as easily as hovels. Lastly, the implication that “we know” the apocalypse will “eventually” come via the heavens is amusing. Rising oceans and crop-killing drought is apparently not something we know will eventually occur.

But hey, maybe the GOP has finally found a piece of discretionary spending it can support.

In other corners of the conservative world, Andrew Stuttaford of National Review wrote, incredibly:

We waste a fortune on measures (that will have no impact for decades, if ever) to tamper with the climate. Some of that money would be better spent on asteroid insurance.

This is a guy who would turn down fire insurance because, hey, he already has a flood policy.

Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum mocked him in a post titled “Frying the Planet Is Okay As Long As We Protect It From Asteroids,” saying that “I can’t really come up with anything witty to say about this. I just wanted to save it for posterity in case someone decides to run a contest at the end of the year or something.” Stuttaford’s response was to cite another piece in Mother Jones discussing the importance of funding efforts to detect threats from asteroids and cry hypocrisy because . . . well, I’m not sure why. Because he thought Drum meant we should never, ever spend money on NASA, and only shovel cash into Al Gore’s bank accounts?

Since then, Stuttaford has gleefully re-posted every mainstream or liberal suggestion that doomsday could come from the skies, though I’m not sure what he thinks this proves: that Democrats want to protect the planet against more than a single threat? Damning, to be sure. Liberals are for guarding against all of the likeliest Armageddon scenarios including the ones that are – contra the deniers – becoming more and more inevitable with each ton of carbon released into the atmosphere. How that makes them hypocrites I’m not sure. No need to try to head off one disaster as long as we plan for another one!

A devastating asteroid impact that snuffs out humanity is possible, even probable, but we may not be able to prevent it even if we could see it coming. Climate change, on the other hand, is not only happening right now, but is fully within our power to mitigate. Certainly it’s easier to focus on asteroids and meteors, and more politically convenient; launching a few rockets doesn’t require any changes in our behavior, or any challenges to the oil companies. We can scan the sky for dinosaur-killing asteroids and still drive our SUVs and burn our coal. But there is something profoundly sad about wringing one’s hands over random, uncontrollable events while obstinately refusing to fix the problems caused by one’s own actions. It’s the ultimate abdication of responsibility.

Really, conservatives should be praying the asteroid hits, not trying to avoid it. Otherwise, the end will not be fast and fiery but slow, smoggy and hot.

Snowball Found in Hell, and the WSJ Is On It!

A lovely selection from the Tea Party Tribune

Like the old Midwestern man standing on his porch, surveying the snow drifts and declaring “Don’t know what all this global warming fuss is about!”, the Wall Street Journal continues its crusade to diligently ignore climate change, even in its ostensibly neutral news pages. On January 9, when most mainstream media sources led with the story that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the lower 48 U.S. states, the Journal relegated the news to page 4, devoting less than 500 words to the topic. By contrast, the Times gave an article twice as long valuable front-page real estate, and followed up with several posts across its blogs. The Washington Post followed suit, covering the record-breaking temperatures not only with a page-one article but with a blog post in the Business section and on its new streaming video channel. You would think the WSJ would be interested; there are few things that will impact major corporations and business owners of all stripes in the coming decades more than rising temperatures and increasingly wild weather. Whether you’re an insurance company reeling from the gut-punch of Hurricane Sandy, a farmer tweaking his crop choices in reaction to a longer growing season, or a multi-national oil conglomerate forced to deal with the European Union’s carbon-control measures, you can’t afford to live in the bubble of climate-change denial: It might literally cost you your job.

Yet the Journal, which routinely turns over its opinion section to open letters from “scientists” (only 4 of the 16 signatories were actual climate scientists) claiming that humans aren’t contributing to global warming while simultaneously rejecting letters signed by 255 real climatologists, didn’t feel that “2012: The Warmest Year” was front-page material. The Atlantic’s James Fallows, comparing the print editions of three major newspapers, notes that the only climate-related news on the Journal’s front page was an artful photo of brush fires in Australia. The news about record temperatures gets one line in the “news briefs” box that indicates a story inside the paper.

Fallows, who in an earlier post also noted discrepancies in the major papers’ treatment of the latest unemployment numbers, writes:

For years everyone who talks about the WSJ has contrasted its editorial & op-ed pages, which are the print equivalents of Fox News or CCTV, with its news operations, admired by all. The main biases of the news operation would be the professional/cultural biases of journalism in general, rather than a Fox-style partisan tilt.

Yet as a matter of strict news judgment and framing, in both of these cases the NYT and the WP chose one emphasis (job report basically positive; climate report quite important) and the WSJ chose an emphasis that was not only different but also more “right wing.” Jobs-report news is basically bad; climate news is not that important. Coincidence? Sign of editorial/news convergence at Murdoch’s WSJ? I don’t know, and these are only two data points. But it may be a trend worth watching.

Well, for anyone watching this particular trend, today’s Journal provides further evidence that its denialist bias is infecting its news pages. Over the weekend, the opinion section ran a bizarre piece by columnist Holman Jenkins titled “Our ‘Hottest Year’ and Al Gore’s Epic Failure” that attempts to pooh-pooh the science behind the NOAA report. He claims the awful media — he might as well pull a full Palin and call it the “lamestream media” — frames the news such that it allows the media to talk about global warming in our time without mentioning that, ahem, global warming has ceased in our time.” He continues:

Nor was it mentioned that 2008, in the contiguous U.S., was two degrees cooler than 2006. Or that 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were all cooler than 1998 by a larger margin than 2012 was hotter than 1998.

For a general take on why such cherry-picked data, which is rife in classic Journal op-eds like “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” is truly the “epic failure,” go here or here. A climate scientist blogging for Discover Magazine wrote that the Journal published “a textbook example of misleading prose. It’s laden to bursting with factual errors, but the one that stood out to me most was this whopper: ‘Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.'” He then provides this trend line, showing that while you can grab a few individual data points to make the case that there are cooler years or regions, you can’t really argue with the fact that the average is going up, or that 9 of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000:

Jenkins then segues into an attack on the “sanctimonious” Al Gore, the Journal’s favorite punching bag, whom Jenkins just really, really doesn’t like. In his view, Americans have ignored climate change because Gore and anyone else concerned with the trend (not the cherry-picked numbers Jenkins cites) of rising temperatures are “more interested in asserting their moral superiority and denouncing their ‘enemies’ than in making progress” and are “prone to self-discrediting hysteria and false assertions about global warming.” Gee, that must be why a majority of Republicans don’t even believe the world is heating up. It couldn’t have anything to do with, say, their favorite media outlet continuously claiming that, uh, the world isn’t heating up.

But Jenkins is just an unhinged member of the editorial board. Theoretically, he shouldn’t have any influence over the paper’s news coverage. But an article in Monday’s paper seems to be straight out of the Jenkins playbook. On page three — a higher placement than was given the story on record-breaking temperatures — the Journal gives us this: “California Farmers Battle Record Chill.” Here’s the gist of it:

Subfreezing temperatures in parts of California are threatening to damage the state’s $2 billion a year citrus industry and have forced farmers to adopt emergency measures.

It’s too early to assess the latest damage, but an Arctic cold front that reached the state on Thursday—and caused a 40-mile stretch of Interstate 5 to temporarily close due to snow—has already led California farmers to spend more than $10 million in cold-containment measures, such as wind machines that circulate warm air at night.

The WSJ view of the world

The words “climate change” appear nowhere in the article, though wildly fluctuating temperatures and extreme weather have indeed been associated with a warming planet. Reporter John W. Miller notes that “even before now, prices for some produce in grocery stores have risen higher than usual because of abnormal weather that has caused shortages,” but he doesn’t go further than that. To be fair, the risk to crops and the financial hit faced by California farmers are issues of interest to the Journal’s business-minded readers. And there’s nothing wrong with writing about the effects of the cold snap — it is, after all, news. Nothing in the piece suggests that a cold spell refutes the science of global warming. But you’d have to be remarkably dense not to acknowledge that’s just how the climate change deniers will interpret it. The Journal doesn’t connect the (non-existent) dots between low temperatures and Al Gore’s wrongness. It doesn’t have to — the talking heads on Fox News, that other arm of the Murdoch empire, will surely take up the task tomorrow morning. The Journal is technically innocent here. But the appearance of the article, and the prominent placement it is given, just days after the Journal all but ignored the 2012 temperature record is nevertheless striking.

It may not mean anything. Perhaps the newsroom is indeed independent, and its editors simply felt that page 3 needed a story about agriculture. Perhaps it’s paranoid to think the Journal mandarins are sitting around their offices, delightedly pointing to a wire story about the cold snap and remarking, “Well, would you look at that.” And perhaps it takes the hyper-awareness of a Media Matters scout to imagine those mandarins chuckling and telling one another, “Take that, Al Gore.”

Still, how terribly convenient that the print media’s leading denier of climate change just happened to stumble across a story that, in the minds of the aforementioned clueless codger, seems to validate the global warming conspiracy theories of the far-right. The Journal’s news editors are educated people, and they likely know that global warming doesn’t mean it will suddenly stop snowing in Wisconsin, or that December in Massachusetts will now mean bathing-suit weather. But they also likely know that isn’t how many of their readers will interpret the story. They’ve seen the cartoon with the guy with the snow shovel grumbling, “We sure could use some global warming right about now.”

So, yes, Mr. Fallows, the WSJ’s rightward slant is indeed a trend worth watching.

On that note, I’ll leave you with a different cartoon, this one from the NRDC, to counter the shovel-wielding climate change denier: