CBN News Reverse-Engineers an Attack on a Climate-Change Scientist to Smear Global-Warming Proponents

Today's broadcast of The 700 Club featured a segment by Pat Robertson's own CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) News on "global cooling," an extreme-minority belief (of course) that not only is global warming false, but that the Earth is actually getting colder.  I'm not going to pretend to have the scientific bona fides to thoroughly debunk this theory, so I'll just direct you to desmogblog.com and their collection of articles on global cooling instead.

But it wasn't enough for Robertson's band of merry right-wing Christian journalists reporters to flog the latest line of b.s. from the anti-warming crowd.  CBN actually took a right-wing slur against a climate-change scientist, flipped it, and claimed it was global-warming proponents making the accusation.

“Climate-change skeptics have been…compared to Holocaust deniers, and even child molesters.”

I've heard the first charge before, and yes, a couple of newspaper columnists made that comparison to drive home the point that the anti-warming crowd is denying the truth in the face of clear and overwhelming evidence.  (Let me say that as a Jew, I take no offense at this comparison.)

But child molester?  Apparently, someone said that too, about Professor Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University:

”Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.”

EXCEPT: Michael Mann is a global-warming advocate.  The child-molester comparison was not made against a climate-change skeptic, but BY a climate-change skeptic—Rand Simberg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think-tank that refutes global warming.  The ultraconservative National Review liked the child-molester comparison so much that they devoted an article to it on their blog.  (Simberg has since wiped the quote cited above from the post on CEI's blog, but the National Review article retains the citation. Dr. Mann is currently suing both CEI and National Review for defamation.)

Did CBN deliberately flip the attack on a global-warming advocate into persecution against climate-change deniers, or just misread it?  Who knows.  Maybe a CBN reporter saw someone say something beyond the pale—and assumed it had to come from the left.  They're the ones who make such comments.  Not us on the right! We don't say such things! WE'RE THE ONES WHO ARE PERSECUTED.

Or maybe they just lied in the hopes that no one would notice.  (There's not much critical analysis of CBN, Pat Robertson, and The 700 Club that doesn't originate from Right Wing Watch or this blog no one's reading yet.)

I did also like the part of the "global cooling" story that suggested the Earth was in fact warming up through 1998, implying that global warming used to be valid.  Which was the position CBN took back then, right?  Of course not:

(Note that the person interviewed in that segment right after "science seems to indicate otherwise" is Fred L. Smith, another Competitive Enterprise Institute figure—the founder, in fact—who holds degrees in theoretical mathematics and political science.  Curious how they couldn't find, you know, an actual climate scientist to make those points.)

Finally, I like how CBN still calls them "climate-change skeptics" even though they believe the Earth is getting colder now.  Keeping that terminology just proves that they're grabbing hold of any anti-warming theory that comes down the pike.

See Also—Robertson: Climate Change Is a Myth Created by Money-Hungry Scientists (Right Wing Watch)

Graphic Credit: desmogblog.com