The Brutally Dishonest Attacks On Showtime’s Landmark Series On Climate Change
The Brutally Dishonest Attacks On Showtimes Landmark Series On Climate Change
BY JOE ROMM ON APRIL 9, 2014 AT 5:45 PM
Percent of Americans Who Believe the Effects of Global Warming Have Already Begun to Happen, by Political Ideology, from McCright and Dunlap
The good news is the video of episode one of Showtimes climate series, Years Of Living Dangerously, has been getting great reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere.
The bad news is the Times has published an error-riddled hit-job op-ed on the series that is filled with myths at odds with both the climate science and social science literature. For instance, the piece repeats the tired and baseless claim that Al Gores 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth polarized the climate debate, when the peer-reviewed data says the polarization really jumped in 2009 (see chart above from The Sociological Quarterly).
As I said, Years Of Living Dangerously the landmark 9-part Showtime docu-series produced by the legendary James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jerry Weintraub has been getting great reviews. Andy Revkin, often a critic of climate messaging, wrote in the NY Times Monday:
a compellingly fresh approach to showing the importance of climate hazards to human affairs, the role of greenhouse gases in raising the odds of some costly and dangerous outcomes and perhaps most important revealing the roots of the polarizing divisions in society over this issue
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The New York Times op-ed is from the founders of the Breakthrough Institute the same group where political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. is a Senior Fellow. It pushes the same argument that Pielke made in his fivethirtyeight piece which was so widely criticized and debunked that Nate Silver himself admitted its myriad flaws and ran a debunking piece by an MIT climate scientist.
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, two widely debunked eco-critics who run The Breakthrough Institute (TBI), begin by ...
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/09/3424593/showtime-years-dangerously-response/