After the 2009 peak of Copenhagen-fever and ClimateGate, media coverage dropped precipitously. Then there’s been a kind of dead cat bounce as the extreme voodoo climate meme was pumped and every hot afternoon became a front page headline. But media interest has plummeted — and in a US election year. To some extent this was coming as the crowd was tired of the hottest year after the hottest year, the tipping points came and went, the apocalypse didn’t happen but the fatigue did. But there is more to that crash that just weariness. Looks like Trump just killed climate news…
See Grist: Major TV Networks spent just 50 minutes on climate change combined last year…
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Climate broadcast coverage was already over the peak before the election year, but the crushing collapse in a “hottest ever massive El Nino year” says a lot. Trumps mockery of the topic was something the media news broadcasters couldn’t handle. It wasn’t a case of Any News Is Good News as the cliche goes, if Trump or the Deplorables had been given any real airtime the whole rent-seeking fantasy gravy train would have run off the rails.
The Boy Who Cried Warming had blamed climate change for droughts, storms, snow, lost cows, and “wrong” voters. There is nothing left. Every shade of near and far apocalypse has been done to death, and then Trump called their bluff so they ran away. They had used mockery and namecalling to silence critics for years, but when Trump owned their mockery and threw it back, they had no ammo left. They had not won the debate through reason and argument but through ridicule. He just turned their main weapon back at them.