"Meet The Press" Abandons Climate Deniers; Actually Has Worthwhile Policy Discussion

"Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd devoted the entire show on
Sunday to the subject of climate change. He pointedly
omitted climate change deniers from the discussion. 

The Sunday morning talk shows usually annoy me. Just a bunch of political pundits trying out their spin of the week. Usually the remarks make headlines, sure, but the whole thing can be obnoxious.

Pardon the pun here, but Sunday's "Meet the Press," hosted by Chuck Todd, was a breath of fresh air. I'm calling it that because Todd devoted the hour-long program to climate change.

Click on this sentence for a full transcript of Sunday's show. 

Todd opened the show by saying this: "We're not going to debate climate change, the existence of it. The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period. We're not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not."

What followed was more of a policy debate on what to do about climate change, which is what the nation and the world as a whole should be focusing on now.

Panelists on the show included climate scientist Dr. Kate Marvel, who, among other people on the show, saying climate change is now, and we have to start dealing with it now.

Todd had previously been criticized for a "Meet the Press" episode in November in which he hosted Danielle Pletka of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Todd didn't challenge Pletka when she said "We need to also recognize we had two of the coldest years, biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years. We don't talk about that."

That statement is completely false.  True, 2018 and 2017 are ending up marginally cooler than 2016, which was the world's hottest year on record. But 2018 and 2017 are fourth and third hottest on record.  

Obviously, I'm going to get pushback about this post from a host of climate deniers and skeptics regarding this post. Social media is packed with them. There's already been a lot of climate denier yelling and screaming on social media about Sunday's episode of "Meet the Press."

A lot of the pushback involves cherry picking past weather events as "evidence" the world is not warming. For example, I see a lot of people citing the extreme heat waves in the United States during the 1930s.

I  can cherry pick, too.  It's true that 1934 was one of the hottest years on record in the United States. It ranks sixth behing 2012, 2016, 2015, 2006 and 1998. (Note those are all recent years). For the Earth as a whole, though, 1934 averaged out a wee bit cooler than average, notes Skeptical Scientist. 

True, those Depression-era heat waves, particularly in the Great Plains, remain easily the most intense by far on record in those regions.  There have always been weather extremes like the Dust Bowl heat waves of the 1930s. The issue is that weather extremes are getting more common, and, generally speaking, more extreme.

I think I partially get where the climate denial crowd is coming from. Most of them are politically conservative, and, to oversimplify, don't like the government telling them what to do. Fair enough.

The concern in this crowd is that if we deal with climate change, that could mean more regulations, more government action, more impinging on their "freedoms."  I just wish these conservatives would get real and get in on the debate.

It would be useful to get ideas from conservatives on how to deal with climate change in a way that does not restrict personal freedoms, in a way that boosts the economy, creates jobs, stays in line with the free enterprise system.

We could really use their ideas.  I'm not being snarky at all. I really mean this.

I think Sunday's episode of "Meet the Press" was done in part because people are freaked out about the extreme weather events of 2018, such as the devastating California wildfires, Hurricanes Michael and Florence, and the big heat waves and flash floods that hit different parts of the nation and the world during the year that's just now ending

Few people would say these weather events were "caused" by climate change, but there's a compelling case to make that many (but not all) of them were probably made worse by global warming.

I"ve also heard climate change skeptics say the world might well be warming, but that's just a natural cycle, unrelated to human activity.

Marvel, on Meet the Press Sunday, said that the warming is largely man-made is perversely comforting. If it were a natural cycle, there would be pretty much nothing we could do to stop it. But since the warming is largely caused by fossil fuel emissions, we can cut back and switch to other alternatives and, over time, slow and stop climate change.

Nobody thinks such an effort would be quick or easy, but you have to start somewhere.