We need a lot of political change in this country, and a lot of media change too. Both modern media and politics focus far too much on contentious debate, and not enough on facts.  Starting now, everyone reading this has to devote some time every day fighting  the lies and the false statements coming out of the mouths of media pundits, right-wing politicians, and their fans, online and everywhere else, or we’re going to have an even worse climate crisis than we have now. We have to call them out on their misleading or deliberately false statements on climate change,  especially their attacks on the EPA.   Climate change deniers are not armed with the facts — we are.   Climate change deniers are like Bill O’Reilly of FOX News.   He’s a person so uninformed he didn’t  even know that tides are caused by the moon, and he has no idea how the moon got where it is.  (He thinks tides, and the moon, were created by magic, outside of the normal realm of science and facts.)  We can’t let people like O’Reilly and others like him (and there are many others) continue to say ridiculously  ignorant things and go unchallenged. If they go unchallenged, people will believe them.

Climate Cranks is a new term used to describe people who deliberately mislead the public about climate change for political reasons. Some of them even get paid for it.  Some of them even send bloggers like myself offers to write “guest articles” in order to lie about fossil fuels.  Some of them simply want the EPA to fail so oil and coal profits remain intact.  They stand for the worst things you can think of:  pollution that leads to serious health problems, including asthma and cancer.  Overall, they are a deceptive lot and they need to be fought against much harder than has been the case in the last couple of years.   The health of Americans and everyone is literally at stake.  It’s important to note that many of these “climate cranks” are in our government and actually deny obvious things happening in the world around them (their slim grasp on reality versus fantasy should be remembered for the next election.)

Here is an excerpt from The Nation on dealing with climate and science deniers.  This article is adapted from Mark Hertsgaard’s HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my daughter was born at a momentous turning point in history. She arrived on a sunny San Francisco afternoon in April 2005. All the nurses kept remarking on how alert this baby was, so her mother and I decided to name her Chiara, which means “clear and bright” in Italian.

I had been covering the climate story for fifteen years by then, and when Chiara was almost six months old, I went to London to interview Sir David King, then the British government’s chief science adviser. The interview changed my [...]