The UN IPCC report on the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C target was published this week, and gee whiz did deniers notice. While mainstream news coverage wasn’t quite as wall-to-wall as some thought it should be--especially considering it’s a story on the impending demise of the human race--the news still broke through the climate “bubble” and out to the mainstream.
Some of the right’s culture-warriors noticed the report and felt compelled to react. Responses range from alt-right idiots peddling that “Climate change is a hoax invented by neo-Marxists,” to the right’s never-Trump, “cool-kid’s philosopher” Ben Shapiro dosing out common sense as pseudo-wisdom about uncertainty. (Shapiro points out that the more specific a statement the IPCC makes, the less certain they claim to be of it. Which should be self-evident. Scientists are certain that CO2 causes warming, but exactly how much at what time is harder to nail down. Apparently that’s the sort of incisive thinking that earns you a position as a leading thinker on the right.)
Then there’s the Al Gore angle, which is more or less just saying his name, in the example of washed-up has-beens like James Woods (an actor most recently appearing in Amber Tamblyn’s story of him trying to pick her up when she was 16), or pointing out Gore’s recurring calls for action, the route taken by never-wases like Anthony Watts and never-will-bes like the Daily Caller’s Michael Bastasch. Get a clue, fellas: that Gore has been warning us for literally decades about the need for action doesn’t mean he’s wrong. It means he was right then, and as the science strengthens, is even more right now.
Bastasch also chose a cherry-picking angle to cover the report’s extreme weather content. Apparently, deniers can simultaneously hold the conflicting positions that these reports are overly alarmist, while also pointing to where the report uses careful, qualified language and admits to uncertainties to (falsely) claim it proves warming isn’t linked to extreme weather.
In the attempts-at-humor department, some deniers are responding to this latest call for climate action with confusing new memes that make no sense, while others are dredging up ancient ones. Steve Milloy pointed out that Al Gore called for CO2-free electricity by 2018 but that now “~ 63% of IS electricity is generated by burning coal and gas” in an attempt to show he was wrong to suggest decarbonizing electricity. Milloy ended the tweet with a very timely and topical use of emoji: “Tell it to the
, Al.” (It’s been like twenty years since the phrase was popular, but Milloy still apparently can’t manage to get “Talk to the hand” right.)
On a more serious note, there is a misrepresentation of the report’s description of a $27,000 per ton price on carbon to scare Americans into thinking a $240 per gallon gas tax is required to fight climate change. In reality, that would be the figure for scrubbing the last ton of carbon from the atmosphere, meaning it’s the very last, very expensive, very theoretical price we would reach by 2100, not what the price would be for the decades leading up to the end of the century.
As for climate denial’s official party line, with EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler apparently too busy with racist Obama memes and pizzagate conspiracy theorists, the Trump administration’s response to the report was summed up nicely by The Hill’s Miranda Green: “Don’t @ me bro”.
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