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Shots Fired: The Weather Channel Calls Out Breitbart For Climate Change Denial
Icebergs as they float out of the Jacobshavn Fjord into the Jacobshavn Bay in Greenland. (Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)
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The Weather Channel doesn't usually make waves beyond giving winter storms cute names, but on Tuesday, the cable network joined the ranks of the BIASED LIBERAL MEDIA and took shots at white nationalist "alt right" website Breitbart.
Note to @BreitbartNews: Earth Is Not Cooling, Climate Change Is Real and Stop Using Our Video to Mislead Americans https://t.co/ipP0fD2BEg pic.twitter.com/ypSMJ4eML6
— The Weather Channel (@weatherchannel) December 6, 2016
The Breitbart "story" in question was one with a typically alarmist and factually incorrect headline: "Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy [har, har] Silence from Climate Alarmists."
Normally, a Breitbart "story" on climate change denial wouldn't garner this much attention, especially from The Weather Channel, but this was one that (sigh) the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology retweeted last week:
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.@BreitbartNews: Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists https://t.co/uLUPW4o93V
— Sci, Space, & Tech GOP (@housesciencegop) December 1, 2016
The "story" drew the ire of The Weather Channel and their atmospheric scientist Kait Parker because it featured a video about this winter's La Niña event. Breitbart, quoting from a Daily Mail story also called out in the Weather Channel's response, alleged that global temperatures have fallen because of the La Niña, saying this "may eventually come to be seen as the final death rattle of the global warming scare."
The Weather Channel, in a story and a video with Parker, called the Breitbart "story" a "prime example of cherry picking, or pulling a single item out of context to build a misleading case," and summarily dismantled the article's points.
For example, the drastic one-degree Celsius drop in global temperatures claimed by Breitbart and the Daily Mail is from just one satellite-based estimate and only records land temperatures, which offer an incomplete measurement since most of the Earth's surface is water. Other data shows a less dramatic drop, which is typical coming off an El Niño event. Breitbart also uses the claim that El Niño is the root cause for the record past three years of warming temperatures, but The Weather Channel points out that even after normalizing the data without the El Niño boost, an analysis still reports that the last few years have been unusually warm.
"So next time you're thinking about publishing a cherry-picked article, try consulting a scientist first," Parker says in the video. "And to all my fellow scientists out there, let's make the facts louder than the opinions."
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