This The New Republic article discusses why climate deniers are actually the hysterical alarmists. They, not climate scientists or activists, are stoking fear with exaggerated rhetoric and outright lies. The climate deniers in the Trump administration are at it again. On Monday, The New York Times reported that the president is silencing critical government research on climate change and creating a panel to question the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions cause warming. The ultimate goal, one former Trump adviser said, is to stop “silly alarmist predictions about the future.”
The climate-denier conspiracy theories continue to this day. Just last week, congressional Republicans invited a man named Marc Morano to testify at a House hearing on the recent United Nations report showing that humans are causing a mass species extinction. Morano called the report a “science con,” accusing the U.N. of putting out “authoritative propaganda” in order to gain “more regulatory control of the economy and people’s lives.” He also accused U.N. officials at the hearing of being in on this alleged scheme, for which he offered no concrete evidence.
Morano is not some random crackpot. Formerly Inhofe’s communications director, he now leads communications for the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow, a conservative think tank partially funded by oil interests, and is executive director of Climate Depot, a sort of Drudge Report for climate deniers. In other words, he’s an influential crackpot.