CNN's Brooke Baldwin fact-checked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Tuesday after Sanders made false claims about the government's most recent report on climate change.
Sanders said the report "is based on the most extreme model scenario which contradicts long-established trends," which Baldwin pointed out is simply not true.
"Fact," Baldwin interjected. "The report 4 years in the making involved 300 leading climate change scientists in 13 federal agencies. That is the president's own federal government."
Sanders continued her forum on how to scuddle science.
"Modeling the climate is an extremely complicated science that is never exact," she added. "The biggest thing we can do is how to make sure we have the cleanest air, the cleanest water, and the president is certainly doing that and certainly leading on that front" (except he isn't; more on that later).
Sanders' oversimplification is very misleading, noted Baldwin. "It is false of anyone to suggest the report was only based on extreme scenarios," she said, referencing the report's range of best to worst climate outcomes.
Baldwin also pointed out that despite Sanders' line about climate science not being "exact," researchers agree that most models have "underpredicted the impact of climate change on ice melt, sea level rises, and increases in extreme weather."
Watch the clip below:
Twitter is CNN's new "Facts First" counter to the administration's lies.
Fact-checking is good for ratings too, who knew?
Facts are all that matter.
The Fourth National Climate Change report released last Friday is the latest dire warning from climate scientists that the consequences of a warming planet are now unavoidable and the damage irreversible.
“While mitigation and adaptation efforts have expanded substantially in the last four years," stated the report, "they do not yet approach the scale considered necessary to avoid substantial damages to the economy, environment, and human health over the coming decades."
The FNCC panel's research predicts economic losses from climate change of up to ten percent of the American economy by the end of the century.
"With continued growth in emissions at historic rates," the report said, "annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century—more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states.
On Monday, President Donald Trump rejected his own agencies' findings but did not offer any evidence to support his disbelief.
“I don’t believe it,” he said after asserting he had read the report. "No no I don't believe it."
Trump incoherently (and falsely) insisted the United States - the world's biggest polluter - is exceptionally clean.
“You know [the report] addresses our country,” he said. “Right now, we’re at the cleanest we’ve ever been, and it’s very important to me. But if we’re clean, but if every other place on Earth is dirty, that’s not so good. So I want clean air and water. Very important.”
This is especially laughable because Trump pulled the United States out the Paris Climate Accord last year, making us the only country on the planet refusing to commit to doing something - anything - about global climate change.
In a tweet the day before Thanksgiving, Trump managed to both flaunt his inability to distinguish weather from climate and make the record cold snap felt by much of the nation all about him.
Trump's aggressive denial of scientific truth was parroted on Sunday when former Republican Senator and CNN commentator Rick Santorum (PA) falsely accused climate scientists of only being in their fields for the money.
@kileywrestling/Bluesky
