Fox News: It’s not OK to link extreme weather to global warming (unless we do it)
As we grumble through the dismal British summer, spare a thought for the US, which has been hit by record heat and wildfires, leading to, ahem, heated debate over how far we can link extreme weather events to a changing climate.
The US has a very different climate media debate to the UK, and now it appears that an intriguing new advocate for journalistic standards has arisen.
Fox News is warning the US media there’s no evidence for linking extreme weather and climate change. Under the title “Newsflash: Summer is hot”, Fox describes how the US media is racing to link the heatwave to global warming.
But that’s just sloppy journalism, says Fox. On Fox News’s ‘The Five’ segment, host Greg Gutfield lays out the evidence:
“As the media reports on thousands of broken temperature records, they ignore what meteorologist Joe Bastardi points out – that half the US had above normal temperatures in June while the other half was below normal.”
But is linking high temperatures to climate change merely bad journalism, or is the US media playing a more sinister game?
“The West has been more successful than the rest of the world. […T]he left will never forgive us for winning, and what better way to convict us than to demonstrate that we’ve murdered Mother Earth herself, especially when such outrage gets you a seat at the next Obama Hollywood fundraiser?”
Ah yes, it’s a conspiracy. For more on the temperature records and their significance, see Dr Jeff Masters here.
All of this must come as a stinging rebuke to… Fox News, which every winter devotes considerable airtime to the theme of extreme weather by suggesting that large snowstorms undermine scientific arguments that climate change is real and man-made – as this compilation from US progressive media watchdog Media Matters shows.