The Guardian caught the significance of some comments from Fox News' Shepard Smith and Fox Business’ Kennedy as they knocked the science behind Coca Cola’s attempt to blame obesity on lack of exercise.
Astute Guardian blogger Dana Nuccitelli was struck by this exchange between Smith and Kennedy during a discussion of Coca Cola’s widely ridiculed publicity campaign.
Lisa Kennedy Montgomery: It’s actually very brilliant marketing on the part of Coca Cola, because they realize that if someone hears that there’s a scientific study behind a reported fact, then they take that, they internalize it and take it to be true … So, what Coca Cola has decided to do is use that “science” in their favor. And if only they could find a few scientists willing to report that it’s not the calories but the lack of exercise that’s making people obese, then they can use this as a sort of an underground marketing strategy.
Shepard Smith: Well this reminds me of two things. The article in the New York Times this weekend pointed out, it reminds you of exactly what the tobacco industry did back in the day, and more recently it also reminds you of what the climate deniers, the climate change deniers are doing as well.
The thing is, as Nuccitelli noted, this is how Fox News covers climate change. He caught Fox Business host Stuart Varney doing exactly that two days later. Varney’s guest was Roy Spencer, a scientist who denies that global warming is caused by humans. Among other misrepresentations in a discussion that was designed to knock President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, Spencer announced:
We have published evidence and there’s getting to be more and more papers published in the scientific literature pointing out that about half of the warming we’ve seen since the 1950s has been natural rather than man-made. It’s because of more frequent El Niño activity.
But Nuccitelli pointed out, "In reality, very few scientific papers have blamed global warming on El Niño. Spencer is one of the few to make this argument, specifically arguing that changes in El Niño have changed cloud cover on Earth, which in turn impacts global temperatures. However, his analysis has been shown to be flawed in subsequent research by prominent climate scientists like Kevin Trenberth and Andrew Dessler.
Of course, Varney didn’t challenge Spencer on that point. Because Fox was using Spencer to market global-warming denying the same way Coca Cola marketed denial that its drinks cause obesity: by promoting questionable science and implying that their viewers should “internalize it and take it to be true.”
Watch the two segments below, from the August 10 Shepard Smith Reporting and the August 11 Varney & Co.
But, given that El Nino (and the sister phenomenon, La Nina) is a term used to describe changing temperatures that seem to coincide with other changes like cloud cover, etc., it is pretty logical to expect that the recent changes in the patterns of El Nino may be a result of climate change. Anyway, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists (well over 95%) agree that climate change IS happening and it is reported (fairly convincingly) that the deniers are financed by the oil companies. The similarities with the tobacco industry are mind-boggling.
PS: If I tell a child to look R and L before crossing the street, am I guilty of fear mongering? After all, there’s no 100% guarantee that a car will pass precisely at the moment it steps off the curb. A timely warning can save lives (and the human race).
Science isn’t ALLOWED to say it’s; “PROVEN” that we must SAVE THE PLANET from UNSTOPPABLE WARMING?
Is that why it was called global warming “belief”?
34 years of 97% certainty and climate action failure is proof science couldn’t be certain no matter how much you doomers hissy fit hate conservatives and fear monger our children.