Back in the late 1990s, my co-authors and I published the now well-known hockey stick curve that demonstrated how unprecedented the warming of the past century is, and it implicated human-caused climate change for the increase in the concentration of carbon pollution due to fossil fuel burning. And I will tell you, it was sort of like PTSD for me five years ago, when public health scientists like Peter and Tony Fauci found themselves under attack in precisely the same way, the same tactics, and even some of the same players. And then there's the conservative media, Rupert Murdoch's media empire, FOX News, Wall Street Journal, that have promoted a lot of the anti-science in both of these areas, but also some of the legacy media outlets, Washington Post, New York Times, that often fall victim to sort of false framing, what we call performative neutrality, where anti-science will be placed on an equal footing with the consensus of the world scientists on the op-ed pages of these papers.
Author: William Brangham, Karina Cuevas
Published at: 2025-10-07 22:20:08
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