Mr. Orwell, Meet Mr. Limbaugh. Mr. Limbaugh, meet--Oh! You've Already Met
People far more famous than I have called Rush Limbaugh a big fat liar, but what shocks me is not just the fact that he shades the truth, or that he blames the Clintons for everything under the sun, or even that he misleads. Everyone has a point of view, and everyone is going to frame an issue in his or her way, but few people calculate their lies as thoroughly as does Limbaugh. At least when it comes to climate, his are big lies, in the classic Orwellian sense.
An example from a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of Media Matters. Here's what he said on his radio broadcast on September 21st:
LIMBAUGH: A story from the UK Telegraph today: "The Truth About Global Warming.
Global warming has finally been explained: the earth is getting hotter because the sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.
"A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes. "
Dr. Sami Solanki, Director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, who led the research, said, 'The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.' "
Has to be the case, because there's global warming on Mars.
All this came from an article in the United Kingdom's Telegraph. Limbaugh falsely claimed it was published the morning he read the opening sentences, but otherwise quoted it accurately. But what he didn't say was what Solanki went on to say:
He says that the increased solar brightness over the past 20 years has not been enough to cause the observed climate changes but believes that the impact of more intense sunshine on the ozone layer and on cloud cover could be affecting the climate more than the sunlight itself.
The article then quoted three other researchers who made similar points. Bill Burrows, a climatologist and member of the Royal Metereological Society, who said the matter deserves further study; David Viner; who said that the effects of deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels had come to dominate natural factors over the last twenty years; and Gareth Jones, who criticized the study for not taking into account greenhouse gases, sulphate aerosols, and volcano activity.
Further, the Max Planck Institute, the research organization for which Solanki works, went on to specifically refute his interpretation a month later in a press release:
These scientific results therefore bring the influence of the Sun on the terrestrial climate, and in particular its contribution to the global warming of the 20th century, into the forefront of current interest. However, researchers at the MPS have shown that the Sun can be responsible for, at most, only a small part of the warming over the last 20-30 years. They took the measured and calculated variations in the solar brightness over the last 150 years and compared them to the temperature of the Earth. Although the changes in the two values tend to follow each other for roughly the first 120 years, the Earth's temperature has risen dramatically in the last 30 years while the solar brightness has not appreciably increased in this time.
Now, it's true that these are complex questions, and, as the above discussion indicates, attributing cause and effect when it comes to a change in the global climate is never going to be a "no-brainer." But the very fact that Limbaugh chooses to ignore all the complexity, and to attribute the change in our climate to a single cause, and to imply in fact that it is a "no-brainer"...shows that he's not interested in the truth of the matter, only in the big lie most convenient to his position.
