The Atlantic: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is”

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information. What is clear from comments such as Kremer’s is that she is not a dupe; although she may come off as deeply incurious and shameless, she is publicly admitting to being an active participant in the far right’s world-building project, where feel is always greater than real.

What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built. Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit, as one X user put it. It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview. But their efforts are doomed, futile. As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes. She followed with: I can’t believe I just had to type that.

Charlie Warzel

Certainly bad to have people threatening meteorologists – talk about shooting the messenger! – and claiming that the hurricanes were unleashed by the government. At the same time, is any of this honestly surprising to anyone who followed American culture? Half the country is in full-blown denial about global warming; the more extreme weather disasters become, the more they need to escalate their denial and blame-shifting, lest they would be forced to face the bitter reality that they ignored the problem for decades, let oil companies get rich and shape the narrative, and now the consequences of inaction are becoming inescapable and threaten their privileged and wasteful lifestyles.

Satellite data shows Hurricane Milton on Oct. 8, 2024, as it moves across the Gulf of Mexico. NOAA

And let’s not pretend Democrats are much better. After passing the IRA, the climate crisis has all but disappeared from the top priorities of the Biden administration. Instead, they are busy expanding oil and gas extraction in the name of energy security, and mounting tariffs on Chinese imports related to green energy, ostensively to protect American companies in these fields – as if the planet cares if green transformation has an American or a Chinese label on it. As in many other policy areas, Democrats are doing the bare minimum to differentiate themselves from Republicans and living by the mantra: ‘see, we’re not as bad as the other guy!’ Unfortunately, that is not nearly enough to improve or solve the challenges of modern society…