Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader?: Climate Change EditionCold weather has come to almost inevitably yield reflexively mindless right-wing media attacks on the scientific consensus about global climate change. Yes, when it's chilly outside, particularly if it happens to snow, media conservatives go into hysterical fits -- declaring the idea that global climate change actually exists and is at least in part caused by humans a complete farce.
Before we get into the worst examples of Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?: Climate Change Edition, it bears noting that there is a very real difference between weather (what we feel outside on any given day) and climate (the study of weather over a long period of time). Now that we've got that out of the way, on with the show.
Perhaps no one delights in cold weather more than Steve Doocy. On Tuesday, the Fox & Friends co-host said, "That global warming thing is really kicking into high gear, isn't it?" The same day, Doocy took to Twitter and Facebook to further muddy the scientific waters, writing, "News flash, it's FREEZING in NYC, I wonder if Al Gore is shivering somewhere," and later, "I was writing ... I wonder if Al Gore is shivering somewhere ... this global warming thing is really starting to kick in." Over the following two days, Doocy declared, "It's not global warming, I'll tell you that," and agreed with a misinformed guest who claimed, "There is no global warming going on."
Doocy was hardly alone.
Internet gossip Matt Drudge was predictably back to his old tricks -- hyping news of cold weather, and Fox News' Sean Hannity again falsely claimed that 2009 was the "coldest year on record" (it's actually among the warmest) before touting later in the week an Al Gore ice sculpture in Sarah Palin's home state that just wouldn't melt to claim that global warming "hasn't exactly reached Alaska."
Other right-wing hacks got in on the fun too, baselessly claiming that under President Obama, the CIA has "diverted" resources to climate research, or "spying on icebergs instead of terrorists," as the Fox & Friends folks put it while passing along an Exxon-funded front group's press release. Heaven knows this isn't a national security issue the agency has been looking at since at least the Bush years. Oh wait, it is.
Funny, we never seem to hear much from media conservatives about warm weather in relation to global climate change. Perhaps their collective scientific sensibilities are like migrating birds -- they only return during warm weather.
