When Fox News host Sean Hannity isn't too busy blaming former President Barack Obama for stock market plunges or talking about "secret sperm cells" within Obama's presidential portrait, he puts on his tin foil meteorologist hat and acts as if he knows something about climate science.
On his radio show Tuesday, Hannity pointed to the major snowstorm that battered the East Coast and used it as a reason to delegitimize scientific consensus on climate change. To accentuate this point, and to also offer a shameless book plug, he spoke with climate change denier and meteorologist Joe Bastardi.
"But they — just one quick question on this — they do lie to us repeatedly about global warming, and then it's global cooling," Hannity said.
Before he could finish the thought, Bastardi interjected, "Yeah," though Hannity never clarified who he exactly meant by "they" or what "they" have told lies about.
"'The ice age is coming,' Time Magazine had, and then the Earth is going to blow up, and burn up, and now they just — they just call it global whatever climate change," Hannity continued. "Because this way, it's generic."
As if he had cracked the code of some secret conspiracy plot to stoke irrational fears about an endangered climate, Hannity continued, "And if it's hot or too hot, they can say it's climate change. If it's cold, too cold, they can say it's climate change. But it didn't work out when they said 'global cooling' or 'global warming,' so they had to fix it."
Naturally, his guest, who has a long history of climate denialism and is a Fox News favorite, completely agreed with Hannity.
(Video via Media Matters)
"Yeah, well, it's like if you were like in [a] match, Sean, and every time you scored a point, the other guy got one," Bastardi said. "That's how it works, any answer is the right answer, anything can happen and probably will."
Unfortunately, the belief that a harsh winter storm proves climate change is a myth is an indoctrination that's not too uncommon in America. In fact, President Donald Trump suggested the exact same thing last December.
But who has actually done the lying that Hannity cryptically suggested? Well, Exxon Mobil, one of the largest corporations in the world, became aware of climate change in at least as early as 1977. The oil titan proceeded to spend the next number of decades, and millions of dollars, to fund the denialism of the science it had discovered.
Meanwhile, the storm dumped a few inches in the New York City area; up to two feet fell in inland areas.
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