The White House has wound down the frequency of its on camera press briefings, but that doesn’t mean that when press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders does show up, she’ll be able to escape scrutiny. This Tuesday, she offered a briefing to reporters that included questioning about the Trump administration’s recently released status report on climate change, and CNN countered her attempted deflection with live fact checks running live next to their feed of the briefing.
She originally faced a question over President Donald Trump’s complete dismissal of the report. Pressed earlier this week by reporters, he asserted that he doesn’t believe it.
Sanders explained:
‘The president is certainly leading on what matters most in this process and that’s on having clean air, clean water — in fact, the United States continues to be a leader on that front. Even Obama’s undersecretary for science didn’t believe the radical conclusions of the report that released, and you have to look at the fact that this report is based on the most extreme modeled scenario, which contradicts long established trends. Modeling the climate is an extremely complicated climate that is never exact.’
Watch below.
CNN countered with their fact check noting that the report in question was the product of the work of 300 scientists and 13 federal agencies and it was even “open for transparency and review before publishing.”
In other words, it was most certainly not some kind of shot in the dark based on only the most extreme modeling.
Why is it so hard for the Trump administration to get themselves together and actually push to protect the climate from global warming? Why must they insist on inane arguments that might as well be from Captain Obvious about how supposedly inexact science is, when the point — no matter the exact tenth of a degree the global temperature sits at — is that the climate is moving in a negative direction for the planet?
The report in question predicted a temperature rise of some three degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 and a slash to the American economy of some ten percent if current trends continue.
How can the Trump administration refuse to take that even somewhat seriously? They’ve completely thrown it out!
Sanders didn’t even get one of her basic assertions right. While it is true that a former Obama administration official has sounded an alarm about alleged missteps in climate science, the official she’s probably talking about — former Undersecretary of Energy for Science Steven Koonin — has made no apparent public comment about the newest report, although he has detailed concerns about a past government climate report, the 2017 “Climate Science Special Report.”
How does Sanders expect us to trust her when she throws around nonsense like that?
The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency had previously sought to bring Koonin on board, ironically enough, in an attempt to manifest a “red team” to debate the climate science at hand — as if observations of the natural world and its course can be debated — but that never happened.
The administration certainly hasn’t stopped seeking to undercut basic reality at nearly every turn, though.
Featured Image via screenshot from the video
