Barring immediate drastic reductions to greenhouse gas emissions, worst-case predictions expect the global temperatures to increase between 3.3 and 5.7 degrees Celsius by 2100. Meanwhile, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, a sea level rise of five meters by 2150 “cannot be ruled out due to deep uncertainty in ice-sheet processes.” Vast numbers of climate refugees would proliferate; famine and starvation would become commonplace (due in large part to the collapse of food-producing breadbasket regions); severe heat, intense hurricanes, wildfires, biblical flooding, and other unprecedented weather events would become the norm; and competition over increasingly scarce resources like potable water would make life on this planet pretty darn close to an actual living hell.
Liberals, presumably, are the ones who care about all of this. The Democratic Party has claimed climate change as its issue, while Republicans dismiss it as a hoax or simply dodge the issue. But you wouldn’t think Democrats were terribly interested in climate change if you were to watch liberal social media. On liberals’ home channel, MSNBC, all meaningful discussion of climate change is either edged out by or subsumed into the mother discussion: Donald Trump.
According to data collated from the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, from October 2023 to October 2024, there were eleven times as many segments mentioning Trump as there were mentioning climate change. During this yearlong period, the network went without mentioning climate change for eighty nonconsecutive days; zero days went by without mention of Trump. Furthermore, many of those mentions of climate change were incidental references made in passing, e.g., during breaking news coverage of an extreme weather event like a hurricane or heat wave. Often they were nested within a list of top issues, e.g., a graphic from November 2023 that reads, “Gen Z’s Top Issues: Mass…
Auteur: Ashley Bishop
