Burning the World Down With the Fox Weather Channel
One of the nation’s leading sources of misinformation on the pandemic is getting ready to invest more resources into the climate change denier field, just as things start to heat up in the west.
That’s right, folks. Fox News has a “24-hour channel devoted to all things meteorological” coming soon to the internet, and marketed across the company’s seven other platforms: the FOX News Channel, FOX Business Network (FBN), FOX News Digital, FOX News Audio, FOX News Books, FOX Nation, and FOX News International.
In total, these outlets currently reach 200 million people each month, with the Fox News Channel having been the most watched television news for more than 18 consecutive years.
Public Citizen researchers found 247 segments to the climate crisis in the first six months of 2019 on Fox. Of those, “212 (86%) were dismissive of the climate crisis, cast warming and its consequences in doubt or employed fearmongering when discussing climate solutions.”
Those of us in California lucky enough to be living near the Pacific Ocean have been lucky thus far in 2021. For the rest of the west, not so much.
Three heat waves in the Western US this summer have triggered wildfires --San Diego got lucky this weekend as the #MarronFire in Dulzura was limited to 52 acres.
Via NBC7:
Firefighters working in searing heat struggled to contain the largest wildfire in California this year while state power operators urged people to conserve energy after a huge wildfire in neighboring Oregon disrupted the flow of electricity from three major transmission lines.
A large swath of the West baked during the weekend in triple-digit temperatures that were expected to continue into the start of the work week. The California Independent System Operator that manages the state’s power grid issued a five-hour ”flex alert” starting at 4 p.m. Monday and asked consumers to “conserve as much electricity as possible" to avoid any outages.
Temperatures in Canada have been so intense that wildfires have been making pyrocumulonimbus, clouds that can generate tornadoes and lightning which can cause more wildfires.
Over a billion mussels, clams and other shellfish have died due to the heat, creating “stink zones” from Oregon to Vancouver.” Almost two hundred people died in the Pacfic Northwest.
Death Valley has endured a week with readings as high as 130 degrees during the day, and over 100 degrees at night. Once in a century events are occurring regularly, and the pace is quickening. The past month was the hottest June on record.
While the west coast has been getting the headlines this past weekend, other parts of the country had crises, as Mark Sumner reported at Daily Kos:
On the East Coast, the Atlantic hurricane season is already setting records. Tropical Storm Elsa picked up a name on July 1, making this the earliest any season has coughed up five named storms. The record it broke was set just last year.
Elsa briefly became Hurricane Elsa before smacking into Cuba, then ticked over the line to become a hurricane again before drenching the Tampa area, then it generated tornados in Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia as it slashed back across country to move off the Atlantic Coast, then it turned north to sweep a wall of rain into New York City. There commuters found themselves wading waist deep through subway stations, or facing flooded streets.
This was no superstorm. Hurricane season is barely underway. What happened in New York was only a tiny slice of what happened across the nation.
As Michael E. Mann and Susan Joy Hassol noted in the New York Times:
Yes, the dice have been loaded, and not in our favor. If climate change were a casino, we’d be hemorrhaging cash. Wildfires, heat waves, floods and superstorms, many exacerbated by climate change, collectively cost the United States nearly $100 billion in 2020. As the climate advocate Greta Thunberg so poignantly put it, “Our house is on fire...”
...Heat waves now occur three times as often as they did in the 1960s — on average at least six times a year in the United States in the 2010s. Record-breaking hot months are occurring five times more often than would be expected without global warming. And heat waves have become larger, affecting 25 percent more land area in the Northern Hemisphere than they did in 1980; including ocean areas, heat waves grew 50 percent.
These changes matter because extreme heat is the deadliest form of extreme weather in the United States, causing more deaths on average than hurricanes and floods combined over the past 30 years. Recent research projects that heat stress will triple in the Pacific Northwest by 2100 unless aggressive action is taken to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.
Let’s circle back to Fox Weather. If there ever was a time for decisive action on the part of governments on all levels, it is now.
Via the Guardian:
“The danger of [Fox News Media] running a weather channel is that if they pervert news about the weather anything like how they’ve perverted news about climate change and energy politics, millions of Americans will be further misled about this crisis,” said Geoffrey Supran, research fellow at Harvard University’s department of the history of science.
“It’s been shown that the most important predictors of public support for climate action are understanding that this crisis is real, human-caused, serious and solvable,” Supran said.
“If, as I and I’m sure others fear, [Fox News Media’s] weather channel downplays the links between global warming and extreme weather, it will only solidify their viewers’ existing biases against climate action.”
Economic arguments against actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to justify the status quo, whether it’s the Wall Street Journal arguing against tax credits for renewable energy, or NIMBYs in Sacramento opposing legislation encouraging densification because it isn’t directly building homeless housing, are apparently fashionable at the moment.
If you stop and think about it for a second, this reasoning isn’t that different from the “open everything up” propaganda pushed by righties during the worst of the pandemic…. “If only we could go back to what things once were…”
These positions assume that the economy and society can prevail with yesterday’s mindsets. Common sense should dictate that schemes from the past have failed. Trickle down didn’t raise anybody up. Energy companies have lied to us all along. Residential equity is vulnerable to schemes promising quick money. Creating goods and services isn’t relevant to executive compensation. Etc, Etc.
Fox is getting into the weather business because it provides a more palatable platform for making the arguments against change that might make life better for the 99% of us who don’t feed our families with stock bonuses..
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