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
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.
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