The Trump administration released a landmark climate report on Black Friday, but instead of becoming Thanksgiving leftovers, the 1,656-page report, a rigorous outline of the present and near-future hazards climate change poses to the U.S., was featured prominently on TV networks over the weekend and into the next week. Much of the coverage, however, included inaccurate, misleading or outright incorrect misinformation.

Right-wing panelist on Meet the Press on climate change: "I'm not a scientist … We need to also recognize we had two of the coldest years, biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years. We don't talk about that." pic.twitter.com/OLPUZOpoKR — John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) November 25, 2018

Assembled by 300 scientists and 13 federal agencies of President Donald Trump’s government, the National Climate Assessment points out the damage a changing climate has already wrought in the country and warns that unless serious action is taken immediately, the economy will be further damaged and additional American lives will be lost. Among the dire economic ramifications: “Annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century — more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states.”

But many of the talking heads featured on TV over the weekend contradicted not just the report’s findings, but even the well-established, widely agreed upon basics of climate science. The first sentence of the nearly 2,000 page report reads: “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.” Even that was up for debate.

NBC’s Meet the Press, for instance, invited Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, to share her opinions on the report on Sunday. (AEI, which is known for sowing doubt about climate change, has received millions of dollars in donations from Exxon Mobil and the Koch Foundation.)

“I’m not a scientist,” Pletka said (truthfully), before saying: “We need to … recognize we just had two of the coldest years, biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years. We don’t talk about that because it’s not part of the agenda.”

This is not true.

“Of the 10 coldest years on record since 1880 in NOAA’s database, none of those occurred after 1913,” said Jonathan Erdman, senior meteorologist at weather.com. “While some regions have had a few cooler years recently,” he added, “when considering global temperatures as a whole, the data clearly shows warming has dominated and accelerated since the 1980s.”

More falsehoods and additional misinformation flooded news coverage of the report. Sen. Joni Ernst told CNN’s Dana Bash: “Our climate always changes and we see those ebb and flows through time.” Former senator and current conservative political commentator Rick Santorum said on CNN that climate scientists have a lot to gain financially from crisis, and British politician Nigel Farage scoffed on Fox and Friends that it was only good to be “green” “at a smart dinner party.” Stephen Moore, an informal White House adviser, said in a CNN panel, “A lot of people are getting really, really, really rich off the climate change issue.”

Sen. Ben Sasse (on Fox News) and Sen. Mike Lee (on NBC’s Meet the Press) didn’t deny climate change, but redirected the conversation to the need for “innovation” without specifics.

Since climate change is real, devastating and caused by humans, which at least 97 percent of climate scientists and the scientific counsel of every nation in the world agrees, and it can be mitigated as the report suggests, then should news networks be giving climate deniers a megaphone?

“Absolutely not,” Dr. Lauren Feldman, associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers, told The Weather Channel Digital. “You know, it’s incredibly irresponsible. There is a lot of research that shows that simply having a single individual on a show like this, questioning the veracity of climate change, can sow doubt and uncertainty in the audience. And so by bringing on climate science deniers, it gives the impression that there is a debate around the science of climate change when there is not such a debate. It spreads misinformation and ultimately thwarts discussion about the actions that we could actually take to do something about climate change.”

Television has the potential to outplay even social media for audiences’ attention and attitude toward climate issues, “because of its visual immediacy and authoritative presentation,” Feldman wrote in her 2016 paper, Effects of TV and Cable News Viewing on Climate Change Opinion, Knowledge, and Behavior. “Those skeptical of climate change have been able to exploit journalists’ norms of balance and objectivity to amplify their voices in television coverage of climate change.”

Televising an artificial debate over settled science is a classic example of the magnified minority tactic in climate disinformation campaigns. Placing a climate contrarian beside a scientist is effectively shrinking the 97 percent consensus on the issue to a 50 percent one — two people arguing opposing sides.

Placing a climate contrarian on air without any scientific counterpoint is, obviously, even worse.

Not every broadcast went with deniers. NASA scientist Steven Clarke got air time on CBS News’s Face the Nation to talk about the report. CBS responded for comment with a transcript of their Sunday show. “You will notice the number of times the climate report came up,” they added, pointing out that Sen. Bernie Sanders appeared on the show to discuss it. (FOX, NBC and CNN did not respond to a request for comment.)

But the treatment given by CBS is rare; John Whitehouse, news director for Media Matters for America, which describes itself as a nonprofit “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation,” pointed out that exactly zero scientists appeared on Sunday news shows during their paucity of climate coverage from 2016-2017.

This is unfortunate, as there is no shortage of scientists eager to inform the public on climate change. Climate scientist Michael E. Mann tweeted at Chuck Todd, moderator of Meet the Press, on Sunday, “Why didn’t you have one of us on to discuss the report? Many of us are practiced at media & appeared on other national news programs … to provide the authoritative, objective assessment viewers deserve.”

.@ChuckTodd: I like your program. But this critique is fair. Why didn't you have one of us on to discuss the report? Many of us are practiced at media & appeared on other national news programs (including @MSNBC) to provide the authoritative, objective assessment viewers deserve. https://t.co/xCIkHwi2na — Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) November 26, 2018

On Tuesday evening, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, one of the authors of the report, was invited on CNN’s AC360. But her segment never aired; instead, she wrote in a Twitter thread that chronicled the evening, CNN went with Santorum’s conspiracy theory saying climate scientists fabricate crises for financial gain. (Santorum is a paid CNN contributor.)

Despite the snub, Hayhoe wrote that she was “enormously grateful for any and all media who wants to talk climate, and equally grateful for the opportunity to do so.”

The next day, CNN.com published Hayhoe’s interview with Anderson Cooper, where she diffused claims by detractors like Santorum that climate scientists are driven by money: “I got paid zero dollars to write this report,” she said. “And honestly, I could have spent those hundreds of hours elsewhere.”

And on Tuesday, Fox News host Shep Smith went with facts and figures from the assessment, reporting, “Rising seas and storms could force tens of millions of Americans to move within the next century, and … some coastal cities are already seeing the effects.”

In the wake of the report’s unlikely buzz, Trump responded to the report’s dire warnings Monday: “Yeah. I don’t believe it.”

Trump’s climate denial has come in just almost every conceivable form, from calling climate change a Chinese hoax, to obviously false claims about polar ice cover, to calling a Rutgers coach he didn’t like a “proponent of global warming.”

And this gets to one of the annoying questions about climate deniers: Are they liars or just peddlers of untruths and inaccuracies? They don’t argue like people who are telling the truth, marshalling facts and evidence to prove their points, so does it even matter? Their arguments — like the president’s — range from flat out wrong to straight up contradictory and seem designed to obscure rather than clarify. A primer:

1. Climate change is not happening.

2. There’s no consensus that climate change is happening.

3. There is a consensus, but it doesn’t matter, because science isn’t about consensus.

4. There is a consensus, but it doesn’t matter, because climate scientists are greedy liars.

5. Climate change is happening, but it’s not caused by humans.

6. Climate change won’t be as bad as people think, it might even be good.

7. Climate change is too difficult to fix, anyway.

8. Climate change is fixable without changing anything.

Just about all of the above arguments were televised this weekend. They didn’t have to be.

WRITTEN BY

Joseph McCarthy

Joseph McCarthy is an associate editor at weather.com. In addition to writing about and producing videos on weather and climate change, he writes fiction. His work has appeared in Soon Quarterly, the Seventh Wave and Zimbell House Publishing. Find him on Twitter.

EDITED BY

Patty Cox and Kevin Hayes

Published November 29, 2018