The Big Lie 2

One of the keys to “success” of “The Big Lie”, according to Joseph Goebbels, is that its proponents “keep repeating it”. This requires either a media controlled by the proponents of the lie, or a compliant / supportive media, or both. The US currently has both a government-controlled media (The Corporation for Public Broadcasting) and a compliant / supportive media. The US Federal government has, in the past, used the media not only to repeat the lie but to reinforce and enhance it. Numerous government-funded studies have developed “scary scenarios” of potential future cataclysm, which have then been publicized by the researchers with little attention to the underlying assumptions and then broadcast by a media driven by the adage “If it bleeds, it leads”.

This process has been underway long enough that it has taken up a life of its own. There are numerous examples of climate scientists attributing events such as floods, droughts, severe storms, etc. to climate change; or, stating that these events were made more frequent or more damaging as the result of climate change. These attributions are made “without any evidence”, in some cases based on unverified climate models. Professor Michael Mann, the self-appointed spokesperson of the consensed climate science community is a frequent source of these attributions.

However, the compliant / supportive media no longer rely exclusively on the assertions of climate scientists to implicate climate change in the occurrence, frequency or severity of unusual weather events. Rather, they simply assert that any event has somehow been affected by climate change. One recent example of this spontaneous attribution to climate change is this report on a tropical cyclone in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people and massive property damage. The report acknowledges that much of the death toll is the result of failure to evacuate and that much of the property damage was the result of inadequate building construction and inadequate surrounding infrastructure. Another example is this report on recent flooding in the upper Midwest, again attributing the severity of the event in part to climate change “without any evidence”.

The obvious intent of this combination of repetition, reinforcement and enhancement is to cause the public to reflexively associate adverse weather events with climate change; and, ultimately, to demand that government act to “fix the problem”. The media also acts to suppress information skeptical of this association, including refusal to include skeptics in panel discussions regarding climate issues.

As insidious as this reflexive attribution has become “without any evidence”, reporting of increases in the frequency or severity of weather events, despite conflicting evidence, is perhaps an even greater problem. Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. has presented evidence that there are no adverse trends in the frequency of severity of weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts in the period for which CO2 is accused of contributing to climate change. However, these presentations have received scant attention in the media.