2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #18

A listing of 26 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 28, 2024 thru Sat, May 4, 2024.

Story of the week

"It’s straight out of Big Tobacco’s playbook. In fact, research by John Cook and his colleagues has shown that character assassination has been one of the most common ways in which fossil fuel interests have attempted to deny accountability for the climate crisis."

— Geoffrey Supan

Why go low? Because when one can't fly, one creeps and crawls. Widely remarked: to fall back on ad hominem remarks is to declare intellectual surrender, at best a Hail Mary attempt to change topics— and easily spotted even by children arguing on a playground. "Going ad hom" is a common failure mode when talk turns to human-caused climate change. US Senator (from hydrocarbon-rich Louisiana) John Kennedy's  waving the white flag and ceding a vast territory of evidence and facts to Geoffrey Supan by diving into the gutter is the subject of our story of the week. Kennedy humiliated himself in the most public of places: in a televised US Senate Budget Committee hearing.

In a nutshell, Senator Kennedy attempted to discredit Prof. Supan and divert attention from the content of Supan's testimony by highlighting a single social media item Supan had reposted, an innocuous description of tactical choices made by a youth-led climate action organization.This was thin fabric, comically so, and made worse by Kennedy's needing to read various expletives from other posts— unrelated to Supan's repost— into the congressional record. 

Senator Kennedy's weird diversion encourages us to speculate— and legitimates scrutiny of Kennedy himself. With Kennedy's having created his own first mover disadvantage by changing the topic of the hearing from science to personalities, we are free in turn to wonder over his puzzling public messaging. Are we are seeing genuine inability to track a topic, or instead something more resembling a retail transaction? Emily Atkin's coverage in Heated tells the whole story and offers hints of where a parsimonious interpretation may lie.

Given Prof. Supan's testimony about the connection between fossil fuel industry contributions and politician support for industry agendas, a reasonable person reading this story must form their own conclusions over the root cause of Kennedy's rhetorical flop. One would think Senator Kennedy would understand how he was walking into a self-made trap of creating suspicions and doubts, issuing an unfavorable invitation to comparisons. After all, Kennedy was among the top four congressional recipients of fossil fuel industry campaign contributions for the 2022 election cycle. With money generally not being handed out in large quantities for zero consideration, one might see this as explanation for an otherwise curious choice to look foolish in front of the world. 

As we can't read Senator Kennedy's mind, we are stuck with speculation. Is he only feigning incompetence? We can't truly know. It is of course for Senator Kennedy to choose how he leads our imaginations and is perceived— we can only respect his wishes, for bad or worse. If Kennedy wants to be remembered by history as "fond of loudly losing, but why?" who are we to question that?

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before April 28

April 28

April 29

April 30

May 1

May 2

May 3

May 4

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

Posted by BaerbelW on Sunday, 5 May, 2024


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