Climate Denial Crock of the Week

True to form, right wing media out in force with the “pay no attention to your lying eyes” message.

Above, Laura Ingraham cites a study from the University of Bristol that purportedly downplays current heat events, and points to intense events in past decades.

Space.com:

The authors said that the global public may have paid less attention to some of the earlier heat waves because they took place in developing countries. 

“Climate change is one of the greatest global health problems of our time, and we have shown that many heat waves outside of the developed world have gone largely unnoticed,” said Dann Mitchell, Professor in Climate Sciences at the University of Bristol and co-author of the paper. “The country-level burden of heat on mortality can be in the thousands of deaths, and countries which experience temperatures outside their normal range are the most susceptible to these shocks.”

Last year’s heat wave in western North America was the deadliest in Canadian history, the researchers said in the statement, causing hundreds of fatalities and widespread destruction through wildfires. 

Thompson added that models suggest that the progressing climate warming is likely to increase the magnitude of heat waves over the next 100 years. 

The study was published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday (May 4).

MediaMatters:

Fox News host Dan Bongino questioned whether the planet is getting warmer and whether humanity played a role in it, asking: “What kind of a dunce believes that? Come on. Is it [the planet] getting warmer? The answer is maybe. … The question isn’t is it getting warmer; the question is what’s human beings’ role in it.” [Fox News, Hannity, 7/19/22]

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton wrote on Twitter: “There is obviously no ‘climate emergency’.” [Twitter, 7/19/22]

Fox host Tucker Carlson devoted a monologue to undermining the existence of climate change, reducing climate predictions to: “It’s gonna be hot and then it’s gonna rain hard.” “No one really believes in global warming,” he continued, “and that’s why all of the liberals in the United States live on the coasts – because they don’t believe it… The entire theory is absurd and they know it. … The whole thing is a joke.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 7/20/22]

On Fox, conservative British political commentator Douglas Murray dismissed the urgency of the climate crisis, saying, “Whenever there is not an absolutely vital recent emergency, we can always fall back on – oh and the climate emergency.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 7/20/22]

Fox anchor Dana Perino asked: “What has changed with the science that would lead a president to need to declare an emergency?” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 7/20/22]

Fox host Todd Piro said that climate impacts, particularly the ones affecting the most vulnerable communities, did not meet his criteria for an emergency: “While we all love clean air and clean water — I, in fact, use both … this is not an emergency that we need to focus on today. We got a lot of other problems in the world.” [Fox News, Outnumbered, 7/20/22]

Fox host Sean Hannity responded to new actions by the Biden administration to address climate change by dismissing the role of human influence over global warming saying, “I think these might be acts of nature, and God, and way out of the realm of something that human beings can prevent.” [Fox News, Hannity, 7/20/22]

Climate change denying author Bjorn Lomborg dismissed the dangerous extreme heat event, writing on Twitter:“Standard climate scare.” [Twitter, 7/17/22]

Climate denier Steven Milloy on Twitter dismissed a Washington Post article linking the Europe heat wave to climate change, writing: “Hot in some places. Cool in others. Just weather. Not climate.” [Twitter, 7/19/22]

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade dismissed the dangers extreme heat poses to human health, saying: “Don’t panic. It is summer. If it was December and this was happening, then I would say, this is a little weird. But it’s just a little bit hotter than usual.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 7/20/22]

Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro said on his radio show that the heat wave and wildfires were being reported so fervently because “you always know that it’s the slow season newswise when you start getting weather reports from Europe. … The thing that they will never tell you, the media, is that more people die of cold every year than die of heat every year, but the cold narrative doesn’t tend to play into the climate change narrative that they wish to progmulate.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 7/19/22]

Fox host Jesse Watters dismissed the extreme heat event as regular seasonal weather, saying: “Joe Biden has seen more seasons than a lot of us. He knows that it gets cold in January and hot in July.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 7/20/22

Watters followed this up with an interview during which an on-screen graphic read: “Dems worried about weather, not real problems.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 7/20/22]

Fox host Greg Gutfeld said: “We are in a full-blown heat wave hysteria.” He said that while he does believe “it’s getting warmer,” climate advocates should “think about the opportunity cost of all the zealotry. You know? Panic didn’t work.” [Fox News, The Five, 7/20/22]