Fox’s Your World show quickly responded to Governor Jerry Brown’s suggestion that climate change is to blame for California wildfires – via a one-sided discussion with a climate-change denier. The guest was David Kreutzer, merely introduced as being with The Heritage Foundation, without mention that he is a climate denier and that The Heritage Foundation is Koch-supported.
Cavuto made it 2-0. He said, “I think climate change has to take a back seat to teenagers and just normal weather to explain these wildfires.” He dismissed climate change as the “excuse du jour for any climactic shift or big event we’ve seen, whether tornadoes or hurricanes." He added, "I’ve talked to a lot of climatologists or whatever you call them who say, ‘Well you’ve got to wonder about the frequency of these events,’ and I come back and say, ‘Geez, I’m not all that old, but I remember a lot of these events throughout the course of my life.’ What am I missing?” As if he thought his guest would disagree.
Kreutzer giggled. “Yeah, you’re not missing anything, and Governor Brown is wrong. People are not denying the basic science …when they say increases in CO2 are not leading to catastrophe,” Kreutzer said. According to him, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data and the IPCC report from last fall “find no trend in droughts, floods, hurricanes, or tornadoes. So it’s not climate change that’s causing these weather disasters.”
Cavuto “asked,” “Do we want to spend trillion dollars fixing a problem that maybe is not man created and cannot be man solved?”
Kreutzer replied, “I think what they have is a very expensive non-solution to what looks like so far is a non-problem.”
Yet Cavuto and Kreutzer left out a lot of facts that the “we report, you decide” viewers might have deemed important. As Associated Press reported, regardless of what causes a fire (and one of the fires was reportedly caused by sparks from faulty construction equipment), climate change almost certainly makes the situation worse:
In the past three months, at least three different studies and reports have warned that wildfires are getting bigger, that man-made climate change is to blame, and it’s only going to get worse with more fires starting earlier in the year. While scientists are reluctant to blame global warming for any specific fire, they have been warning for years about how it will lead to more fires and earlier fire seasons.
“The fires in California and here in Arizona are a clear example of what happens as the Earth warms, particularly as the West warms, and the warming caused by humans is making fire season longer and longer with each decade,” said University of Arizona geoscientist Jonathan Overpeck. “It’s certainly an example of what we’ll see more of in the future.”
Watch the unfair and unbalanced discussion from the May 19, 2014 Your World below.
