A core MAGA persuasion/demagoguery tactic is substitution of real facts with lies, falsehoods or crackpot nonsense, usually somehow self-serving. Sometimes alt-facts are benign. But sometimes they literally kill people. Other times they cause harm or impose economic costs.
Public health alt-facts
An arsTechnica article, RFK Jr. thinks AI will free us from the “tyranny” of medical facts, expertise, exemplifies the situation nicely. In his irrational exuberance about AI, America’s unqualified and incompetent public health leader, RFK Jr. comments: “We’re never, ever again going to be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us trust the experts, because every American will be able to check their own medical advice. ….. If somebody tells you masks work, trust the experts, AI may tell you otherwise. If somebody tells you social distancing works, trust the experts, AI may correct that. And if somebody tells you that a vaccine will prevent transmission and infection—oh, you need to take it to protect your grandmother—AI may say it actually doesn’t do that”. Kennedy goes on to say that AI will free us from the “medical tyranny” of doctors and health experts.
But AI can make boo-boos in health care responses. On the up-side, as ars points out, despite its errors at least AI seems to hallucinate less than Kennedy. Golly, that’s reassuring.
Global warming alt-facts
Despite overwhelming climate expert consensus that it’s real and humans are the primary cause, MAGA demagoguery continues to be packed with lies, falsehoods and crackpot denials. And despite overwhelming real world human experiences, outright denial has become harder to sustain. So MAGA the messaging now often moves the goalposts from denial to claims such as “it is happening, but it is harmless; adaptation alone will handle it; mitigation cannot work; or action is worse than the damage”. All of those MAGA propaganda assertions are alt-fact claims treated as facts that the available evidence overwhelmingly contradicts.
Human harms include deaths and injuries recorded during warming-enhanced hurricanes, floods, heatwaves, wild fires, and crop failures. One estimate is that global heat-related mortality averaged about 546,000 deaths per year in 2012–2021, up 63.2% from the 1990s. Obviously, not every such death can be assigned solely to climate change, but something major is going on and global warming is a major part of it.
Excluding loss of life, health-care costs, and ecosystem-service damages, an IPCC estimate is that global warming costs the US ~$150 billion/year.
Not surprisingly, special interests that significantly profit from pollution are still fighting tooth and claw to deny, downplay and avoid as much responsibility for global warming damages as they can get away with. So far, they’ve gotten away with a staggering amount by making society bear the costs and blocking governmental efforts to deal with global warming and greenhouse gas pollution.
Costs to individuals include (1) higher homeowners’, flood, and wildfire-insurance premiums, or loss of insurance entirely, (2) food price increases after heat, drought, crop disease, floods, or supply disruptions, (3) higher electricity demand for cooling, grid upgrades, and emergency response, (4) public costs for emergency aid, rebuilding, health care, firefighting, coastal protection, and disaster-resilient infrastructure, and (5) hard to price damages, e.g., deaths, disability, trauma, ecosystem loss, cultural loss, forced migration, etc.
Q1: How much responsibility, if any, do Trump and MAGA elites bear for decades of heavy reliance on alt-facts to deceive, distract, disinform, and polarize people into forming false beliefs that wind up killing or costing them?
Q2: Should oil companies, plastics companies, and other businesses that significantly profit from polluting be taxed to defray some or all of the costs that people, societies, and governments now pay?
Some info sources:
IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: Chapter 3: Human Influence on the Climate System — The evidence for human influence on recent climate change strengthened from the IPCC Second Assessment Report to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, and is now even stronger in this assessment.
IPCC Fifth National Climate Assessment Report — Extreme events cost the US close to $150 billion each year—a conservative estimate that does not account for loss of life, healthcare-related costs, or damages to ecosystem services.
Climate Science, Risk & Solutions: Dispelling Myths — All analyses of all surface temperature data sets compiled by major climate centers around the world show a clear warming trend. ….. It is well-established that human activity is the dominant cause of the warming experienced over the past 50 years.
The 2025 Global Report of the Lancet Countdown — The report represents the work of 128 experts from 71 institutions, monitoring progress across 57 indicators – from heat-related deaths to bank lending to fossil fuels – providing the most comprehensive assessment yet of the links between climate change and health.
A climate scientist on how to recognize the new climate change denial — Delay, deflect, downplay, and other ways fossil fuel companies block climate action.
DENIAL, DISINFORMATION, AND DOUBLESPEAK: BIG OIL’ S EVOLVING EFFORTS TO AVOID ACCOUNTABILITY FOR CL IMATE CHANGE — The key findings include: Documents demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science. ….. Big Oil’s deception campaign evolved from explicit denial of the basic science underlying climate change to deception, disinformation, and doublespeak.
No comments:
Post a Comment