Keeping Hoax Alive

By Bill Maher

It got really cold over the holidays and Disney’s “Frozen” was a big hit at the box office, so global warming isn’t real.

A new survey by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication finds that nearly one in four of us believes climate change is “not happening” and that’s considerably more of us than just eight months ago. Live Science reports, “The number of Americans who believe global warming isn't happening has risen to 23 percent, up 7 percentage points since April 2013… The proportion of people who do believe in climate change has been steady since April 2013, but the proportion of those who say they ‘don't know’ whether climate change is happening dropped 6 percentage points between April and November 2013, suggesting that many ‘don't knows’ moved into the ‘not happening’ category.” No surprise there. Idiots who “don’t know” can be manipulated.

Meanwhile, California has declared a statewide drought emergency. USA Today reports, “Almost 99% of California is considered abnormally dry or worse; almost two-thirds of the state is in extreme drought,” and, “2013 became the driest year on record in California; San Francisco had the least rain since record keeping there began during the gold rush of 1849.”

And halfway around the world at the Australian Open tennis tournament, players and fans were dropping like flies due to heat exhaustion, with the New York Times reporting, “The temperature climbed over 104 Fahrenheit. It was the longest heat wave in the…area in more than 100 years… 243 people had gone to the hospital for heat exhaustion… One player hallucinated and fainted, while another vomited; the soles of one player’s sneakers melted, as did the bottom of another player’s water bottle...”

I blame the media for their false equivalence in wanting to report both sides, even when one side is clearly wrong, and America’s tribal political mindset that encourages otherwise smart folks to blindly side with “their team.” There’s worldwide scientific consensus on this issue. It’s a real problem with an achievable solution. It’s unconscionable to give people permission to ignore it. When our supposedly responsible media and political leaders deny manmade climate change, it’s like a trusted scoutmaster bedding his troop down on the railroad tracks because he doesn’t believe in trains.