Climate scientist testimony outrageously misrepresented by U.S. conservative media – ‘Such an obvious distortion could arise only from a lack of the most primitive of reading comprehension skills’

Desdemona Despair

By Michael Mann
27 June 2016

(Facebook) – As part of my testimony to the Democratic Party Platform drafting committee a week ago, I made the point, using slightly rhetorical language appropriate for the occasion, that the impacts of climate change are no longer subtle, we no longer need sophisticated signal-detection methods to see the impacts of climate change:

I am a climate scientist, and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate model output and observational climate data, trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change.

What is most sobering to me – and so many others in my field – is that the sophisticated methods we’ve worked so hard to develop and apply over the years are often no longer necessary. The impacts of climate change are so profound now that all we need do is open our eyes, and witness them in real time, in the headlines and on our televisions screens as they play out over the course of the 24 hour news cycle.

The usual suspects – that is to say, right wing pseudo-news sites who serve as disinformation specialists for the ‪#‎Kochs‬ and ‪#‎ALEC‬, like The Washington Times and The Daily Caller – obviously saw this as an opportunity to misrepresent what I was saying, pushing untruthful headlines like “Famed Climate Scientist Claims Data Now ‘Unnecessary’ To Measure Global Warming“.

Such an obvious distortion could arise only from a lack of the most primitive of reading comprehension skills on the part of both the reporter and editorial staff … or from an intentional desire to mislead readers.

Michael Mann