Vice, along with its associates, including the far-left outlet The Guardian, polling company YouGov, and the climate change news propagandist group Covering Climate Now, undertook a push poll to demonstrate how worried Americans are about climate change. They say the debate is over, but it is not, because science does not proceed or progress by polling.
The poll itself is largely predictable and uninteresting, but the commentary by the authors of the article reveals their lack of knowledge on the climate change debate.
In the Vice article titled “45% of Americans Don’t Believe Humans Cause Climate Change, VICE News/Guardian Poll Shows” the authors write:
“This year was marked by several unprecedented natural disasters, including a “heat dome” marked by sweltering temperatures of up to 113 F that plagued the Pacific Northwest, killing hundreds, and record-breaking wildfire seasons that razed entire towns and displaced thousands. Experts linked the string of natural disasters to the climate crisis, and yet, many Americans are still struggling to understand whether and why the generation-defining crisis is happening.”
As sensational as it is patronizing, these claims are only partially correct. Yes, the Pacific Northwest experienced a severe heat-dome, but this weather event was not “unprecedented.” Heat domes have popped up in that region before. It did set record highs, and then record cooling immediately followed. The media neglected to report on that.
As meteorologist Anthony Watts detail in a previous Climate Realism post, titled “Heatwave Reporting Illustrates How Science Has Been Corrupted with Climate Groupthink,” the reporting on recent fluctuations in the weather of the Pacific Northwest, has been extremely misleading.
The truth is, as detailed here, here, and here, cold is still the real killer, not heat.
Also From Vice:
“Many respondents (30.5 percent) think there’s a raging scientific debate over the cause of climate change when there really isn’t. Globally, there is consensus among scientists—97 percent or more—that global warming is happening because of human activities, according to NASA and international science societies.”
Climate Realism and The Heartland Institute have repeatedly debunked the silly claims about a scientific consensus existing concerning the causes and consequences of climate change, for instance, here, here, and here. However, the author claims there “really isn’t” a scientific debate over the cause of climate change at all and this is clearly and verifiably false. There might not be rigorous, honest debate in the media, but beyond the shallow selective reporting is a massive body of research and investigation by scientists from different fields. Scientists continuously question everything; the degree of human impact, the amount of warming (including if there is any at all), what the long-term effects are, potential benefits of warming, the impact of solar activity, and dozens of other topics. Some of this debate was publicly aired the recent 14th International Conference on Climate Change, whose videos can be viewed here.
The media doesn’t want you to go to the primary sources and learn for yourself what debate is being had. Shamefully media outlets like Vice and The Guardian, and organizations like Covering Climate Now, filter and select information based on their political goals, not what is good for science or the general public.
Good read. It has been very annoying to constantly hear about how “the Science is settled”.
People seem to have forgotten what the process of science actually is in favor of the modern buzzword interpretation.