Yesterday we pointed out how lazy RealClearEnergy is in ripping off other people's content to drive clicks to its Chevron-sponsored page. Today, we see that even that level of work ethic isn't as low as it goes. For that, we turn to The Federalist, where on Monday Kiyan Kassam ("a conservative writer," according to a very sparse contributor bio) published "3 Facts To Arm You Against Global Elites' Biggest 'Climate Crisis' Lies."
A more honest headline would have been "3 Climate Disinfo Talking Points From Old Bjørn Lomborg Op-Eds," because that's literally all it was:
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Kassam's first fake "fact" is that global wildfires are "at their lowest rate in decades," but real scientists have pointed out that "The decline in global average area burned has indeed been misused to support false claims numerous times. There is strong evidence that the increase in fire activity we are seeing in many forested regions is indeed linked to climate change.”
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The second falsehood is that "the severity and frequency of landfall hurricanes in the U.S. are actually decreasing slightly, not increasing." But what does a real scientist say? "Concentrating on the continental U.S. landfall frequency record has become a bit of a cottage industry for anyone who wants to claim that hurricanes are not linked to climate change. We're not sure that there will be more storms that form, and there may even be fewer that form, but when they do form, they are more likely to be very dangerous: stronger winds, higher storm surge, more rain and freshwater flooding, slower moving and more likely to stall."
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And finally, there’s the misleading claim that "climate-related deaths are down 99 percent worldwide over the past 100 years," which, again, is a reliable disinfo factoid Lomborg's been finessing to get around fact checks debunking it.
Kassam links to a Bjørn Lomborg opinion piece to justify each point, but each time he somehow forgot to credit Lomborg. And while someone could certainly be forgiven for not naming each individual author in a link-filled essay, as that quickly gets cumbersome and the URL serves as an inherent citation to give credit, if you're making three big points and each one comes from the same person… maybe that's worth mentioning? (Maybe not though, if that source, like Lomborg, is a longtime spreader of climate disinformation who has recently aligned himself with the likes of sexist climate science denier Jordan Peterson.)
Now, since Lomborg appears plenty happy to plagiarize himself, and since his job is basically to spread this propaganda, odds are slim that he'd be mad about The Federalist copying his work.
But it just goes to show, once again, how the spread of disinformation is driven largely by just a handful of producers, whose work is regurgitated (laundered) through pseudo-media outlets built to churn out a steady stream of propaganda to fill news vacuums, drive social media clicks, and pander to political partisanship.