Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Followers of my early videos will remember how easy it was to take apart the
Crock – ICYMI, above. Ironically, given current events, the video opens with a shot of Richard Nixon.

So, fake science for the POTUS, as he passes real, deadly serious top secret intel to hostile foreign enemies. That’s where we are.

The Hill:

President’s Trump’s deputy national security adviser reportedly gave the president fake information, leading to a crackdown at the White House.

K.T. McFarland handed the president a printout of two covers of Time magazine, Politico reported, citing four White House officials familiar with the matter.

One of the covers appeared to be from 1970 and issued a warning of a coming ice age. The other cover was from 2008. That one was about surviving global warming.

But the cover from 1970 was fake and part of an internet hoax, according to Politico.

Washington Post:

In the Trump White House, “Good enough for government work” has developed a whole new meaning.

Politico’s Shane Goldmacher has outlined a remarkable scenario that unfolded recently in the West Wing. Deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland apparently provided President Trump with copies of two Time magazine covers depicting scientific concerns about a changing climate: Worries about a new ice age in the 1970s and then global warming in 2008. Trump fumed — until staff members poked around on the web and realized that the “ice age” cover was fake. A White House official defended McFarland’s raising the issue to Goldmacher: Although the cover was not real, “it is true there was a period in the ’70s when people were predicting an ice age.”

It’s worth running though all of the points of failure that occurred, leading to Trump raging against a hoax.

1. Obviously, that the deputy national security adviser was sharing an Internet hoax. And not just any Internet hoax, but one of the most pernicious rhetorical “rebuttals” to the idea of climate change of the past decade.

2. That she — an adviser to the president on national security! — was sharing it with Trump without having taken any steps to verify its accuracy.

3. That Trump reportedly accepted the story uncritically.

4. That, when confronted, a White House official defended the underlying premise of the fake cover — which itself is misleading.

If you’re curious, the original “an ice age is coming” trend trickled through the popular media at the time in the way a story about a wacky mug shot might today. It was not a consensus view in the scientific community, nor was there sustained reporting or research supporting the idea.

“The broader point I think was accurate,” the official told Politico, calling the cover “fake but accurate.” It isn’t. There was no casual flip-flop on the nature of the shifting climate, although those looking to undercut the current consensus clearly have sought to uncover one.