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Stewart and Colbert double team climate change deniers with a satirical approach that ends in a world of eternal darkness.
Our most popular post by traffic criticized both sides of the climate change debate for faulty reasoning. The logic typically goes like this: It’s unseasonably cold and snowing, therefore global warming is a myth. Or, it’s unseasonably warm and this particular weather event is extreme, therefore we’re experiencing climate change in real time. Both positions are absurd.
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert took on the issue in an uncharacteristically redundant way. When both shows “cover” a story, it’s typically from much different angles. In both cases, the fake news hosts point out that one could just as readily conclude that night would become a permanent state after the sun had dropped behind the horizon.
Let us know who you think did a better job of illustrating the absurdity of denying (or supporting) climate change based on a single day or weather event.
Incidentally, do you think waning support for climate change action is partly the result of its complexity and the difficulty of communicating the nature of the threat in simple sound bytes? Is the science too complicated to inspire enough people to take the threat seriously? Do we need a different approach in addressing the core problem of climate change without relying on the highly politicized nature of climate change?
4 responses so far ↓
1 Makenzie Marineau // Feb 11, 2010 at 12:36 pm
Thanks for this great post. Both videos are pretty hilarious, but they make such great points. It reminds me of a point Friedman made in “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” about if global warming isn’t true but we still take the steps to prevent it, what is the harm it’s going to cause?
2 Andrew Winston // Feb 11, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Good post…and amazingly similar to mine today!
http://bit.ly/cMAFNz
I think there are MANY reasons support for climate change action is waning. Some are clearly psychological and the nature of the threat. It’s distant, diffuse, etc. I actually think we shouldn’t really talk too much about ‘climate change’ at all and just keep it all in terms of the many reasons to cut carbon that have nothing to do with climate change (national security and competitiveness, profitability, health, etc — sorry to be self-promotional, but see my piece on this here…http://bit.ly/5ofCv1)
Anyway, the current way of talking about climate is sort of failing in this country. We do need a new approach…
3 JerryChan // Feb 11, 2010 at 7:55 pm
I think that this is so funny – but really it is so true not to single out the people in the northeast of America (new york and washington DC) you are not the only part of the Earth – just cause it is colder there it is not in most other parts of the world where record temps have risen – you are in fact a small fraction, this Global Warming hoax stuff does get pretty tiresome though specially talking about about it so much
4 phil // Feb 11, 2010 at 9:50 pm
here’s a simple solution, dont watch tv for the news, what did your mothers ever tell you about not believing what you see on tv?
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