Energy

Here’s What WaPo Doesn’t Understand About Global Warming

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Andrew Follett Energy and Science Reporter
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The Washington Post published two articles this month containing factual errors and misleading context about what’s going on with global warming.

In an article published Monday, the Post used a misleading photo and failed to discuss the relative costs of “action” on global warming. In an article posted two weeks earlier, the paper claimed that deaths by heat waves were increasing due to global warming when they were actually on the decline, and then the newspaper mixed in material about the Gulf of Mexico into an article about the global warming in the Persian Gulf.

The first Washington Post article misleadingly uses the picture shown below of a thick grey haze in Indonesia to talk about CO2 emissions. Carbon dioxide is an invisible and odorless gas, which is not causing the grey haze in the image. One of the Post’s sources calls CO2 “an invisible threat” in the piece.

WaPo Can't Read

The piece itself was about today’s high CO2 levels, but today’s CO2 levels are only responsible for a temperature increase of 0.68 degrees Celsius according to the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center.

The scenarios the Post discusses are largely based around projected future CO2 emissions, which will come in large part from China and India. But the only emissions reductions the Post talks about making are in the United States and European Union, where reducing emissions is much more expensive.

Another article predicts the Persian Gulf may be too hot for humans to survive near by 2090, but the “study” it links to is actually a book by a research firm that is available for $50 on Amazon. The phrase “Persian Gulf” doesn’t even appear in the publicly available summary of the book. The Washington Post uses the study to speculate that heat deaths in the United States will, and have, dramatically increased.

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