Ah, Politico - Still Pretending That There's A "Debate" Over Climate Destabilization

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It’s absurd for Politico to toss in the phrase, “which he attributes to man-made causes.” The Pope is not the one doing the attribution. The world’s top scientists, and literally every major government in the world, are — most recently in the fifth assessment of the scientific literature of the IPCC. Could you even imagine Politico writing, “the Pope demanded more action to stop the spread of cigarette use, which he says causes cancer and other health problems”? That would be absurd. But that is equivalent to what Politico did here.

The Encyclical explicitly makes clear the Pope is drawing on “a very solid scientific consensus” and “a number of scientific studies” and so on. As this New York Times headline put it in June when the Encyclical came out, “Pope Francis Aligns Himself With Mainstream Science on Climate.” Heck, even the Politico reporter covering the launch broke character and snuck in this line in a June story, “The long-awaited encyclical put Pope Francis in line with the scientific consensus that climate change is an urgent threat that is largely human-caused, and he called out skeptics for delaying actions to solve it.”

Precisely. “Based on well-established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening” — as the world’s largest general scientific society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, explained in its 2014 report, “What We Know.” The AAAS continued:

The science linking human activities to climate change is analogous to the science linking smoking to lung and cardiovascular diseases. Physicians, cardiovascular scientists, public health experts and others all agree smoking causes cancer. And this consensus among the health community has convinced most Americans that the health risks from smoking are real. A similar consensus now exists among climate scientists, a consensus that maintains climate change is happening, and human activity is the cause.

But as with the majority of Politico pieces on climate, readers learn nothing of this. The one final mention of climate change in the recent piece about the Pope’s coming visit is simply this: “Still, many of his declarations, especially on climate change and the dangers of ‘trickle-down economics,’ are at odds with positions held by Republicans, including nearly all of those running for president.” Yes, the Pope’s “declarations” on climate change are “at odds with” the views of Donald Trump and virtually all other GOP presidential candidates. Shouldn’t readers get at least get one sentence saying who else Trump et al. are at odds with — like, say, every major scientific society along with the world’s leading governments and their national academies of science? Even in articles entirely about climate change, like Monday’s “GOP to attack climate pact at home and abroad,” virtually the entire focus is the political drama. The one mention of science buried in that 1300-word piece is “In Paris, representatives of nearly 200 nations will try to hammer out an agreement for curbing the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for warming the planet and boosting sea levels.” Readers never learn who is doing the blaming or why we should listen to them and not, say, the GOP leaders who are the focus of the piece.

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http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/09/09/3699571/donald-trump-politico-pope-climate-change/