Environment Climate Change Science Politics and Technology

Alternative Facts Began with Climate Change Denial and Now Have Spread to Voting and Crowd Size

January 25, 2017

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January 25, 2017 – When Kelly Ann Conway brazenly described U.S. press secretary’s claims on the size of the crowd at Donald Trump’s inauguration as alternative facts, she was following a lengthy legacy of false news, false facts, and outright lying by a generation of climate change deniers.

Evidence-based reasoning is taking some hard hits these days. The election of Donald Trump has elevated climate change denial to stratospheric heights in direct contradiction to the overwhelming consensus among the scientists who do the measurements, modeling and analysis. Alternative facts are now the norm. The executive of the United States government has removed climate change as a subject from its website. There have been rumblings that government departments like Energy and the Environment and government-funded agencies such as NASA and NOAA are to steer clear of the subject. Even the Center for Disease Control cancelled an upcoming conference looking at climate change and trends in disease vectors.

Trump, prior to becoming President, called climate change a hoax. He now says he has an open mind and is truly an environmentalist. But his actions speak louder. His mission is to restore coal mining and coal-fired power plants under the guise of a “clean coal” mandate. He will expand the domestic search, (he includes Canada for the moment when he talks about domestic) for more oil and natural gas, for more pipelines to move them, and for increased refining capacity. This pursuit is in the name of energy independence. He sees within the energy mix renewables and storage as worth pursuing, but they are far from his focus.

When it comes to alternative facts one would think that Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and other nations with authoritarian leadership would lead the way. But not so. Climate science denial as alternative facts is largely a U.S. way of thinking. And not all of the U.S., but largely centered in the Republican Party. In this institution we find the core believers and backers of anthropogenic climate change deniers. The constant messaging and media coverage that tries to always put a climate scientist with a climate change denier has leveled the mass media playing field. It is a disservice to Americans and has been effective in making the U.S. the only country on the planet with a significant number of its citizens in denial mode. In particular, the Republican Party subset, known as the Tea Party have been leading anti-environment, anti-climate change advocates.

American-based oil companies have pitched anti-climate change and put money into foundations and institutes that sound legitimate but are largely alternative fact generators. Scientific evidence and scientists feel the futility of having to deal with these alternative fact creators.

When NOAA and NASA announced that the last three years have been the warmest since modern record keeping started, climate change skeptics talked about distorted facts. Fox News has been a consistent purveyor of alternative facts about climate. Its litany of misrepresentation of the science is legion. Listen to Fox News and you get stories like “global warming stopped 16 years ago,” or “we’re actually in a global cooling period.” Clearly the many readings from a worldwide network of Earth and ocean-based climate stations and sensors, plus data from Earth observation satellites, are to be ignored in light of alternative facts such as:

observed warming is driven by variation in solar activity
the warming to date is within the natural climate variability experienced since the last Ice Age
climate models used by climate scientists are flawed
carbon dioxide is not contributing to climate change
there have been no discernible changes to sea ice, just look at Antarctica where sea ice is actually growing
extreme weather events are not evidence of global warming
sea level rises are within normal variability and the report of drowning Pacific islands and coastal towns in Alaska are really about high tide events

Kelly Ann Conway is honoring a tradition that goes back to Exxon’s senior executive in the 1970s who chose to lock up evidence of anthropogenic climate change discovered by their own scientists and engineers. This is the same Exxon that along with the Koch brothers has funded the Heartland Institute and its climate-change denying “experts” who hold seminars to spread their alternative facts.

We, therefore, shouldn’t be so hard on Kelly Ann. She has been well-schooled by an entire generation of liars who can look at hard scientific evidence and then make up their own alternative facts to suit themselves.