I’m asking climate experts to comment on aspects of what I call the “New Climate Denial”, which is the same as the old climate denial, but just given a facelift by the Trump administration, in a DOE publication authored by the same-old same-0ld group of fossil industry war horses that have been grifting off of their crank contrarian opinions for decades.
One favorite: “The number of acres of wildfire globally has gone down.”
True.
But misleading.
Dessler and Kopp – Climate Experts Review of DOE Climate Working Group Report:
The likelihood and intensity of the most extreme wildfires has increased in North America, which has had major effects in the western US. These extreme fires have generated substantial ecological, economic, health, and livelihood impacts across the US.
The consequences extend far beyond fire-prone regions due to smoke transport across continental distances, exposing populations nationwide to serious health risks.
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Below, Jeff Berardelli of WFLA has a useful explainer.
Your link to the Dessler/Kopp et al review of the deeply flawed denier document Energy Secretary Wright commissioned from his favorite climate deniers reminded me – Steve Koonin is, unsurprisingly, back in the Wall Street Journal spreading misdirection about the supposed validity of the National Academies’ Consensus Report “Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts”. He invents fake details of how such reports are staffed, reviewed and assemble by the Academies. I’ll not bother with the link, it’s just in the normal spot where WSJ editors do Murdoch’s work instead of providing reliable news reporting.
Title and subheading for it are:
“False Unanimity at the National Academies
A climate report spins an illusion of elite scientific consensus.”
That he’s now at the anti-regulation Hoover Institute, or that he tried watering down the American Physical Society’s policy statement on climate change a decade ago, means just that he’s now long away from any scientific career and is now just a reliable denier available to any GOP groups looking to perpetuate societal harms.