2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #21

A listing of 34 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, May 19, 2024 thru Sat, May 25, 2024.

Story of the week

This week's typiclal compendium of stories we'd rather were plot devices in science ficition novels but instead are captured from our own small planet present a daunting prospect. We're in a world of trouble, documented day-by-day. Is there a unifying theme to our troubles, and if so what's our answer?

How about looking for a theme?

That's 10 of 34 stories we highlight this week. Granted this is colored by Skeptical Science's own prism, which is concerned with climate change as a communications challenge thwarted by vested interests.. That said, the litany of physical, biological and cultural impacts of our accidental sudden changing of our climate clearly share a common root cause: fossil fuel extraction and marketing at prodigious scale. 

Nobody originally intended or volunteered to cause harm on the scale of our anthropogenic climate change, but equally we shouldn't expect any volunteers to step forward to abandon what's worked before in terms of acquiring wealth in astronomical quantity. Let alone gratuitously eschewing vast riches, the entrenched fossil hydrocarbon industry is actively working to preserve the earning capacity of its natural gift-- including by promoting copious bunk (pdf) for absorption by the public mind. We can gauge the success of this strategy by our current global temperature. Climate disinformation works at scale.  

All of this by way of elliptically arriving at our Story of the WeekMastering FLICC - A Cranky Uncle themed quizRarely we blow our own horn— that's what you're hearing now. What's "FLICC?" FLICC stands for "Fake experts," "Logical fallaices," "Impossible expectations,' "Cherry picking," and "Conspiracy theories." FLICC is a taxonomical system for classifying different forms of bunk, allowing us to identify which particular cognitive weapons are being targeted at our psychological susceptibilities. Here we're talking about climate disinformation promoted by the fossil fuel industry.

Some familiarity and practice with FLICC helps us to deal with the firehose of climate myths lobbed into our brains by professional disinformers on a daily basis. Our Story of the Week is really a quiz: How are your bunk detection skills right now? Take our test and find out. If you're not happy with your results, give our FLICC synopsis a read! 

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before May 19

May 19

May 20

May 21

May 22

May 23

May 24

May 25

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, 26 May, 2024


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