A behind-the-scenes look at the making of propaganda, the kind that paints the world we see

Larry Kummer, Editor

10 years ago

Summary: Today we have a brief fascinating look behind the scenes at the creation of propaganda, the primary tool shaping not just the opinions but the worldview of 21st century Americans. Continuing my pattern of alternating between sides, today’s post looks at an example on the Left.

Our elites have discovered our gullibility, and built pretty organizations to exploit it, spinning professionally-produced stories that match our biases and feed our fears. Such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, providing advice to journalists and commentary to the public.

Today we review two articles in which they take us behind the scenes to show the making of climate propaganda. First, “TV News and Extreme Weather: Don’t Mention Climate Change“, 18 December 2013 — Excerpt:

Dramatic weather-related disasters are ready made for TV news. But what’s not on the screen? The human-made climate change that is affecting, and in some cases exacerbating, that extreme weather.

A new FAIR survey of the national network newscasts (CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News) finds that extreme weather is big news. In the first nine months of 2013, there were 450 segments of 200 words or more that covered extreme weather: flooding, forest fires, tornadoes, blizzards, hurricanes and heat waves.

But of that total, just a tiny fraction–16 segments, or 4% of the total–so much as mentioned the words “climate change,” “global warming” or “greenhouse gases.”

… It’s almost as if the altered climate and the weather were happening on two different planets.

What odd definition of extreme weather includes all forms of flooding, forest fires, tornadoes, blizzards, hurricanes and heat waves? These are all normal weather. The IPCC special report about extreme weather defines it more narrowly:

The occurrence of a value of a weather or climate variable above (or below)a threshold value near the upper (or lower) ends of the range of observed values of the variable. (see Box 3.1 for more detail)

How does F.A.I.R. show a connection between global warming and these incidents of quite normal weather? This second article explains: “Attributing Weather Events to Climate Change Is the Easy Part“, Jim Naureckas (bio here), 14 November 2013 — Excerpt:

There’s a phrase that comes up a lot in news reports that do discuss the relationship between climate change and extreme weather that get the connection completely backward. Here it is in the New York Times story (11/12/13) Peter quoted:

Yet scientists remain cautious about drawing links between extreme storms like this typhoon and climate change. There is not enough data, they say, to draw conclusions about any single storm.

And on NBC Nightly News (11/11/13): “While scientists can’t say whether climate change contributed to this particular typhoon, they believe global warming is making storms stronger.”

Here’s Bryan Walsh on Time‘s website {“Time Ignores Climate Change to Paint a ‘Golden Age’ of Fracking, FAIR, 15 May 2012}: “The reality is that it remains extremely difficult to attribute specific weather events to climate change.” {“Climate Change Didn’t Cause Super typhoon Haiyan“, Time, 11 Nov 2013}

And Brad Plumer in the Washington Post (“What a deadly typhoon in the Philippines can tell us about climate adaptation, 12 Nov 2013“):

Detecting a clear trend here is difficult, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded. And it’s even harder to say whether the strength of a single storm like Haiyan can be attributed to man-made climate change.

The reason all these statements are backwards is that attributing particular weather events to climate change is ridiculously easy: Every weather event in the modern world is attributable to climate change. This is because weather is a chaotic system, which is to say it varies wildly based on initial conditions. Once we raised global temperature by a degree Celsius – which is an enormous intervention in the physical world – we irrevocably changed all weather, producing an entirely different set of events than the ones that would have otherwise occurred.

So climate change caused Typhoon Haiyan – in the sense that Haiyan would not have happened in the absence of climate change. Note that this is the most basic and obvious meaning of the word “cause.”

This is high-quality propaganda, the sort of which has reduced the public’s confidence in newspapers from a low 38% in 1983 to a is-this-a-business 23% in 2013 (per Gallup). A new poll by YouGov shows that only 12% trust science reporters “a lot”, 57% trust them “a little”, and 26% “not at all”. How sad that Naureckas protests journalists’ efforts to regain their credibility.

His story misleads in several ways.

(a) Does the IPCC believe global warming is “making storms stronger”? From the IPCC report Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) (approved November 2011), section about Climate Extremes and Impacts:

There is low confidence in any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity (i.e., intensity, frequency, duration), after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities.

From the report of IPCC AR5 Working Group I, Chapter 2:

“Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin”

“In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low.”

(b) Note the moving pea, conflating natural climate change (the omnipresent natural processes) with anthropogenic climate change (i.e., from emission of CO2 and aerosols, land use changes, etc) — especially anthropogenic global warming (the dominant warming driver since after WW2. So even natural climate change becomes a reason for radical political action — to the gullible.

(c) Naureckas says “Every weather event in the modern world is attributable to climate change … So climate change caused Typhoon Haiyan – in the sense that Haiyan would not have happened in the absence of climate change.” Is this true? We can interpret this in two ways.

If the climate did not change since WW2, would we have hurricanes of the same frequency and strength (i.e., would Hurricane Haiyan have happened?). FAIR’s statement is clearly false. The IPCC said there is low evidence that hurricane frequency and strength have changed, hurricanes continue to be a natural phenomenon.
Did the 1.3°F (.7°C) of anthropogenic warming since WW2 cause Hurrican Haiyan? Climate scientists tend to be quite adamant against making such connections, especially about quite normal weather.

The remarkably misnamed Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting seeks to make weather reports a vehicle for daily propaganda about climate activism. Here we see one dimension of a large project, a barrage of fear on the public that grows more intense as the pause in warming continues (now 15 to 17 years long, depending on the metric used) and their past predictions of extreme weather increasingly prove false (e.g., hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, global sea ice).

Think of this as a test. We have a clear consensus of climate scientists — clearly communicated through the IPCC and other climate-related agencies. Opposing them are activists seeking to arouse fear to increase public support for public policy changes they desire — and on the other side by political activists seeking to discredit scientists (along with government officials and many other civil institutions).

Who will we listen to? We face many issues like climate change — with more to come in the 21st century. To cope we must learn to sort experts from activists, facts from fiction — no matter how appealing the stories created to deceive us.

A few key things to remember about global warming!

While cheering for their faction of scientists, laypeople often lose sight of the big picture — the key elements for making public policy about this important issue.

The work of the IPCC and the major science institutes are the best guides for information about these issues.
The major global temperature measurement systems tell — broadly speaking — the same story since the 1970s: two decades of cooling, two of warming, followed by a pause (see summaries of the growing body research about it here, and the IPCC’s view here).
This is consistent with the larger firm conclusions of climate scientists: two centuries of warming, coming in pulses (ie, waves), with anthropogenic factors becoming the largest (not the only) driver since roughly 1950.
There is a debate about the attribution (causes) of past warming — which probably varied over time — between natural drivers (eg, rebound from the Little Ice Age, solar influences) and anthropogenic drivers (eg, CO2, aerosols, land use changes). Other that that stated in #3, the IPCC’s reports make few claims about attribution of climate activity, as this remains actively debated in the literature.
There is an even larger debate about climate forecasts, both the extent of future CO2 emissions and the net effects of the various natural and anthropogenic drivers.

For the past five years my recommendations have been the same:

More funding for climate sciences. Many key aspects (eg, global temperature data collection and analysis) are grossly underfunded.
Wider involvement of relevant experts in this debate. For example, geologists, statisticians and software engineers have been largely excluded — although their fields of knowledge are deeply involved.
Start today a well-funded conversion to non-carbon-based energy sources by the second half of the 21st century; for both environmental and economic reasons (see these posts for details).