How Tea Party rumors gain traction
Ostensibly, the Tea Party meeting I attended Tuesday night in Peachtree City was about the “cap-and-trade” climate change bill that Congress is now considering.
But a passing reference to an unrelated rumor was more interesting. And it said a lot more about the way the Tea Party rank-and-file gets worked up over things that aren’t even happening.
This week’s baseless rumor apparently is that President Obama is planning to ban protests on the National Mall. “Treason,” one Tea Partier responded when he heard that. Another yelled something about “revolution.”
Here’s the video. Below’s my explanation of why the rumor appears to be totally baseless.
Top 5 tall tales by climate change deniers in 2009
t was a banner year for myth making about climate change. Despite mounting evidence that temperatures are rising, the deniers’ camp spun bigger, better and more believable tall tales than ever before.
And those stories worked like a charm in 2009. Amplified by broadcast bloviators and a compliant mainstream media, advocates for burying our collective head in the sand convinced millions of Americans that climate change isn’t happening, isn’t caused by people, or wouldn’t be such a bad thing anyway.
Here are five of the top 10 tall tales in the 2009 climate change denier’s storybook.
Read the rest of my Media Mayhem column on climate change tall tales at the Mother Nature Network.
Copenhagen: A big success for Obama
Those casually watching this month’s Copenhagen climate conference — and the activists passionately involved in it — may have concluded it was a failure. I just posted an article on My Green ATL that argues otherwise.
One of the biggest winners coming out of Copenhagen was Barack Obama. And, depending on what happens over the next 12 months, we could all turn out to be winners, because Copenhagen at least kept that possibility open.
That’s not the conclusion you’d get by listening to screaming cable anchors and reading a mainstream press obsessed with “balancing” opposing sides and hyping failure. Then, again obsessing on balance and hyping failure don’t often produce an accurate view of truth.
Check out the article at My Green ATL. It’s, ahem, brilliant.
Copenhagen so far: Accord or babel?
Amid the unruly flow of the Copenhagen climate conference, it’s difficult to tell what progress has been made toward an accord. The prevailing view is that the meeting has bogged down in so much discord that a meaningful agreement isn’t likely.
The world’s wealthiest nations aren’t willing to cut their emissions enough to keep global temperatures from rising more than the key level of 2 degrees Centigrade during this century, while poor and developing countries remain committed to fossil-fuel-based growth that’s sure to increase their carbon emissions for decades to come. And the poor and developing countries are demanding aid from wealthy countries to help them deal with the effects of climate change and make the transition to the clean energy economy, but it’s far more aid than the wealthy countries are prepared to give.
It’s doubtful at this point that the conference will produce a legally binding treaty requiring deep cuts in greenhouse gases. That appeared unlikely before the conference began, however. The real question is whether a mix of smaller actions and the promise of continuing talks creates or halts momentum for combating climate change in the United States and China, first and foremost, and then in other countries.
Read the rest of this brilliant post and comment at My Green ATL Read more
Is AJC a climate change denial outfit?
The radical transformation of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from a force for progress and reason in Georgia to a pandering servant of what its editors apparently believe is its right-wing readership hit a new milestone today.
While the rest of the world — even Fox News! — has moved on to the U.N. climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, the AJC has pretty much ignored that historic event. Instead, it remains obsessed with a non-issue: the so-called “Climategate” “scandal,” which even some conservatives are beginning to acknowledge is overblown and inconsequential. Read more
Copenhagen Day 1: EPA sends a message
I’m closely following the the Copenhagen climate change summit at My Green ATL. But what happened Monday in Washington was a big deal in Denmark.
On the Copenhagen climate summit’s first day, the big news came from back in Washington, where the Obama Administration took the most significant American action yet on climate change: The Environmental Protection Agency laid the groundwork for the regulation of greenhouse gases — whether or not Congress acts.
Read the rest at My Green ATL.
Copenhagen climate summit updates
All this week and next, I’ll be sifting through articles and blog posts on the Copenhagen climate summit, and will aggregate the best of them at our other blog — My Green ATL — in one or two daily posts. Occasionally, we’ll file some of our own stories.
For those who aren’t that familiar with the climate summit, here’s this morning’s Copenhagen update.
To follow the Copenhagen talks, subscribe to My Green ATL’s feed, follow us My Green ATL on Twitter, or subscribe to My Green ATL’s e-mail updates.
Georgia Tech prof engages skeptics on climate dispute
The last time Georgia Tech hurricane expert Judith Curry drew attention from the popular media she was a little miffed.
In 2005, Curry and a colleagues testified before a Senate committee on a study they’d authored, which found that global warming was making hurricanes stronger. An aide to Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., responded by accusing them of “espousing minority views that a vast majority of scientists dispute.”
Curry, who chairs Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, was puzzled afterward that the press focused on the politics surrounding the aide’s outrageous comments rather than on the groundbreaking study, which after all was published only days after Hurricane Katrina had struck New Orleans. She still says climate-change deniers “slandered” and “libeled” her and her colleagues.
Now, however, Curry’s diving willfully into the eye of the media storm surrounding the politics of climate change — and she’s again drawn attention from national media…
See the rest of this article at my environmental website My Green ATL
‘Climategate’ — more bluster from deniers
There’s nothing people like more than a good fight. How else to explain that e-mails stolen from a climate research center in Great Britain warranted, in just a few days, more than 15,000 blog comments, wall-to-wall cable coverage and a front page article in the New York Times, while the most comprehensive review of actual climate change research since 2007 went virtually unnoticed?
Southern Co. tied to troubled coal group
Some utilities and other major companies have bailed out of a coal-lobbying group that’s in hot water for hiring a PR firm that sent falsified letters to Congress. But not Georgia Power’s corporate parent.
The Southern Co. still appears to be a major supporter of the controversial organization.
Read the rest of this post at our environmental blog, My Green ATL.
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