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Fox News Discusses Climate Change. Insanity Ensues.
Fox News Sunday addressed President Obama’s proposal to establish a $1 billion Climate Resilience Fund to help prepare communities for the consequences of extreme weather events by hosting a panel discussion about the very existence of climate change. The cringe-worthy conversation revolved around jokes about the season’s cold winter and claims that Democrats are abandoning the term “global warming” as a result. Some highlights:
CHRIS WALLACE (HOST): “Well, the president’s case may seem a bit hard to make when the eastern half of the country is in the grips of a brutal winter!”
GEORGE WILL: “When a politician on a subject implicating science, hard science, economic science, social science says the debate is over, you may be sure of two things. The debate is raging and he’s losing it.”
CHARLES LANE: “If we had a better economy, I think people would have more of a luxury to worry about climate change.”
KIM STRASSEL: “It became climate change when you couldn’t prove that there was much global warming anymore.”
Watch a short compilation:
In fact, lawmakers and scientists have used the term “climate change” for decades. In 1970, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a paper titled “Carbon Dioxide and its Role in Climate Change,” focusing on how emissions of carbon dioxide warm the atmosphere. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established 18 years later, in 1988.
By 2003, GOP word guru Frank Luntz urged conservatives to stay away from the term “global warming” and only use “climate change.” “‘Climate change’ is less frightening than ‘global warming,’” he wrote in one memo. As one focus group participant noted, climate change ‘sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.’ While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.”
Ironically, Fox News Sunday followed up its climate denial panel by a magic act that promised to “make you question — can you really believe what you’re seeing?”
The post Fox News Discusses Climate Change. Insanity Ensues. appeared first on ThinkProgress.
Source: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/16/3297871/fox-news-discusses-climate-change-insanity-ensues/
