Scarcely a day goes by without some old codger who will be dead before the worst consequences of climate change take hold going on national TV to declare that anyone who's concerned about those consequences is an "alarmist." Tuesday was no exception, a fact the world unfortunately learned from the Tweet Machine-stylings of the President of the United States. The world's most powerful man was watching his favorite show, you see, and a guy appeared on the teevee screen saying something he liked. Never mind whether it's true—it confirmed his nonsense views on a crisis that poses an existential threat to human civilization as we know it.

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” @foxandfriends Wow!

Wow!

(Of course, because this is our world now, the White House Twitter account gave this a retweet. If the institutions of our government are going to be corrupted entirely into post-truth political organs of the mentally banjaxed chief executive, it's only right that their official communications channels reflect that.)

It seems Moore was tailoring his language specifically to catch our Big Dumb President's ear because he knew he was watching, using terms like "Fake News" and "Fake Science" to describe mountains of peer-reviewed research from scientists across the world. The clear intent was to get the president to amplify him:

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.@greenpeaceusa co-founder @EcoSenseNow claims there "is no climate crisis" as he rips @AOC and her Green New Deal.



"It's a silly plan. That's why I suggested she was a pompous little twit." pic.twitter.com/qzmb40GXOy — Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) March 12, 2019

Notice that Fox News was kind enough to push Moore's book in the chyron while he said it. Here he is celebrating:

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Meanwhile, Patrick Moore is not a co-founder of Greenpeace, at least according to Greenpeace:

Patrick Moore frequently portrays himself as a founder or co-founder of Greenpeace, and many news outlets have repeated this characterization. Although Mr. Moore played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years, he did not found Greenpeace. Phil Cotes, Irving Stowe, and Jim Bohlen founded Greenpeace in 1970. Patrick Moore applied for a berth on the Phyllis Cormack in March, 1971 after the organization had already been in existence for a year...

Moore often misrepresents himself in the media as an environmental “expert” or even an “environmentalist,” while offering anti-environmental opinions on a wide range of issues and taking a distinctly anti-environmental stance. He also exploits long-gone ties with Greenpeace to sell himself as a speaker and pro-corporate spokesperson, usually taking positions that Greenpeace opposes.

It does seem like Moore has an ideal background to serve as a gun-for-hire on behalf of polluters and anti-environmental groups. His shtick is particularly appealing to the conservative media of today, which loves the idea of a Liberal Who Saw the Light leaving that world to expose the indoctrination and groupthink that make The Left tick.

Just today, the president tweeted about another Fox & Friends segment about Jewish people supposedly leaving the Democratic Party—a "Jexodus" that invokes "Blexit" and "#Walkaway," in that they are social-media campaigns that smell strongly of astroturf. This stuff is catnip to viewers who believe everyone who disagrees with their political beliefs has been brainwashed by liberal college professors or The Liberal Media.

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"Jexodus" isn't a thing in the same way "Blexit" isn't a thing, but Fox & Friends gave it airtime and now Trump is tweeting about it.



Left, Fox & Friends, 7:26 am

Right, Trump, 8:12 am pic.twitter.com/XW3brMD09u — Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 12, 2019

According to DeSmogBlog, Moore's record since leaving Greenpeace tells its own story:

Moore has been criticized for his relations with “polluters and clear-cutters” through his consultancy. His primary income since since the early 1990s has been consulting and publicly speaking for a variety of corporations and lobby groups such as the Nuclear Energy Institute. As of 2014, Moore was also listed as a board member of NextEnergy, a Canadian energy services company.

So it does seem possible that Moore traded a career advocating for the environment—a notoriously non-lucrative gig—for a seat on the Wingnut Welfare Express. He is now a professional climate-change "skeptic," who darts around the scientific consensus to attack it or muddy the waters from a variety of different angles. Back in 2009, he could be found suggesting that global temperatures are not, in fact, getting warmer. This is false, and his predictions about a continued cooling trend that would restore Arctic ice levels have been exposed since.

Martin Stocker-Waldhuber, a glaciologist with the Austrian Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research, measures a wooden marker pole protruding on an upper portion of the Outer Mullwitzkees glacier. The team was conducting its annual measurements as part of a study begun in 2006 to asses the rate at which the glacier is shrinking in depth, which Stocker-Waldhuber says is currently approximately one to 1.5 meters per year. Sean Gallup Getty Images

More recently, he could be found getting himself into the Actually, More CO2 Is Good movement. In that way, he's not unlike William Happer, the National Security Council official that the president was reportedly set to tap as leader of a new White House panel tasked with "questioning" the findings of climate scientists and the Pentagon that climate change is real and poses a national security risk. Happer leads the CO2 Coalition, a group I profiled at CPAC in 2017 that postures as a defender of the benefits of CO2, but also denies the scientific consensus on climate change. Their real intent is clear: to stop any political or policy action that reflects that consensus.

It seems Moore has gotten a hang of today's conservative rhetoric in recent weeks, launching performative broadsides at Democratic leaders on environmental issues like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom he called a "pompous little twit" from his Twitter account, "EcoSenseNow."

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@AOC

Pompous little twit. You don’t have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels, or get food into the cities. Horses? If fossil fuels were banned every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating. You would bring about mass death. — Patrick Moore (@EcoSenseNow) March 3, 2019

He popped up on "Breitbart News Tonight" this month to discuss the "cynical and corrupt machinations fueling the narrative of anthropocentric global warming and 'climate change'." Those machinations are also known as the rigorous processes by which the scientific community tests and eventually accepts the findings of its members to form a consensus. The consensus that climate change is real and man-made is based on decades of research by hundreds of scientists from dozens of countries.

Moore also appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show Monday night. (This was the same night where Tuck suggested it was just a leftist "mob" that had a problem with his previous comments that, among many other things, dismissed women as "extremely primitive.") Moore used that appearance to suggest the Green New Deal would lead to the "end of civilization." In all these appearances, he's credited as a Greenpeace founder.

But what do you expect from a guy who once claimed you can drink a glass of Roundup and suffer no consequences to your health. Of course, when an interviewer asked him to drink some of the stuff, he seemed a bit less cavalier:

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These are the people the President of the United States is getting his information from, because we elected a Fox News Grandpa as president. He does not read, and skimps on briefings from his actual professional staff. Instead, he melts whats left of his very good brain with cable news between four and eight hours a day, accepting whatever the people in the teevee tell him as long as they say nice things about Donald Trump. It doesn't matter if they're titanically full of shit—in fact, that makes it a lot more likely they'll say nice things about him. As a result, there's a whole universe of grifters trying to squeeze their fortunes out of the Dumbest Time in History, peddling stupidity seasoned to the tastes of the president and his movement.

Meanwhile, the ice is still melting and the fires are still burning and the hurricanes and typhoons are still slamming into coastal communities with increasing ferocity. There are far too many people who think they can make enough money now to insulate themselves from the consequences to come. There are far too many whom we've elevated to powerful positions to disseminate information in our society, and who are too dumb or too ignorant to see the escalating truth. Which one of those categories contains the American president?

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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