Right-wing website pays folks to deny climate change

I've just learned a strange factoid: A right-wing website is paying people to deny climate change.

The site in question is WorldNetDaily. If you don't know WorldNetDaily, then, trust me, you probably don't want to. Let's just say, they're a little miswired over there. WND was founded by Joseph Farah, who had also helped start the right-wing Western Journalism Center, which itself was heavily funded by conservative foundations. This shows how well-financed the rightist noise machine is.

WND has just concluded a video and essay contest in which winners receive cash awards to deny global warming. Contrary to popular belief, the contest was for people 18 or older - but the point of it was to create anti-science propaganda disguised as "educational" materials for children. In addition to the cash prize, winners also receive copies of a discredited wingnut book to give to their local school library and science classroom.

And let me just say this too: The winning entries are as laughable as WND itself is. The incomprehensible, boring videos feature mumbling narrators and misleading graphs. Some of the data that zooms across the screen (in what appears to be a poor knockoff of the old 'Sesame Street' skits in which a letter flew through outer space) actually makes the opposite point that the contestants tried to make. This data doesn't do a thing to debunk climate change. (The goofy picture that accompanies this article is from one of the winning videos.)

Then again, WorldNutDaily is part of the same movement that thinks Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and that the Answers in Genesis cult is science. When WND peddles its dogma to children, that raises a red flag. America already has one child who believes this anti-science propaganda - his name is George W. Bush - so WMD doesn't need to be brainwashing any more children.

I'm wondering who's bankrolling WND's contest. Oil companies have financed shit like this before.

Once science determines something is real, how can you debunk it? If climate change is just a theory, then so is the law of gravity. But they don't try to discredit the law of gravity, because there's no advantage for the corporate world or other control freaks to do so. Of course climate change exists, because the findings are based on hard statistics. When you see temperatures that are consistently higher or lower than before, you can't attribute it to someone pouring ketchup in thermometers.

The debate is over. Climate change is real.

(Source: http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/30/right-wing-organization-paying-kids-for-denying-global-warming)