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While politics have long divided views on climate change, a majority of Americans agree that extreme weather, flooding, wildfires and heatwaves, are occurring more frequently. The recent heatwave has garnered plenty of news attention, but depending on what your sources are, root causes of these events can vary widely — and in some cases — be ignored completely. Straight Arrow News contributor David Pakman is saddened to see right-wing media downplay any connection between the weather and climate change:
The United States and Europe have been experiencing historic heat waves, record highs, extended heat waves, extended periods in the triple-digit, one ten in some places. And it has been really an exercise in–what is it– frustration, sadness, desperation…to see right-wing media like Fox News cover the heat waves cover every aspect of it. This is the sun that gets hot and pavements melting and its records and air conditioning and electric grids without talking about climate change.
Now I know that some of you might say, “But David, weather and climate are two different things.” And of course, you would be completely correct — weather and climate are two different things. But multiple weather events start to give us a pattern. That pattern is what we call climate. If it’s really hot one day in Texas in the summer, we can’t really say anything about the change to climate as a result of that. If for decades, you see the same part of Texas set more and more record highs for a sustained period of time, and also sometimes in the winter, more and more record lows because remember, it’s not global warming, it’s climate change, which includes unseasonable warm unseasonable cold, stronger precipitation, events with precipitation, stronger storms, all of these different things…over time, all of these weather events start to determine what is the pattern. And when you have multiple decades of all of these extremes and superlatives being reached, you say, well, there might be a pattern here that we call climate, which is changing.
If a place gets hotter overall, not just on one day, well, then that might be something to look at. And Fox News has gone out of its way all week to cover all month, sorry, to cover this heatwave without actually talking about climate.
