Jenny Smith
Jefferson City
Dear Editor:
There is a persistent climate denier that is a frequent writer to this paper. He references sources that he finds at a website called Climate Depot. Here is a short sampling of "information" you can find at this site: Polar Bears are doing fine. Carbon Dioxide increases are good for us. Severe weather is on the decline. Plastic bags help the environment. Methane is OK because it doesn't reach the atmosphere. None of these statements can be supported by reliable scientific data.
A nonpartisan fact-checking site "Media-bias/Fact Check" whose mission it is to expose deceptive news practices rates the Climate Depot site as pseudoscience, promoting climate denial propaganda and using unreliable and non-peer reviewed sources. The articles at Climate Depot are mostly opinion-based and opposed to the consensus of science. The sources are overtly biased. The graphs they post trying to make a climate denial point often don't show a credit or source of the graph.
The Media bias/fact Check site reports that, "Overall, we rate the Climate Depot as a pseudoscience source based on promotion of human influenced climate denialism propaganda and use of poor sources who have failed numerous fact checks."
The best sites for getting undoctored climate facts are the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Many of the scientists at these agencies have only one agenda: collecting data. They don't get more pay if they their data supports a corporation's bottom line or a government's agenda. They are neutral arbiters of the facts.
Climate Depot is funded by CFACT which receives much of its funding from Exxon-Mobil. Do you think a fuel company would have an agenda? You can bet they do.
There are other fact-checking sites where you can check the veracity of the news you read: Snopes, Politifact, FactCheck.org, TruthorFiction.org and others. These sites expose both left-wing and right-wing misinformation. There is no reason to just accept something you read as fact, especially opinion pieces. It takes five minutes.
Writers to this paper do a great disservice by dispensing misinformation. Readers should make the effort to check the facts they read in these letters. We can't believe everything we read, without question simply because it aligns with our politics.