Yet despite that literal, concrete evidence, Professor Kirtman told me that a third of those he talks to about the data behind human-influenced climate change just don’t buy it. So he has stopped trying to persuade that part of the population.
“They’re going to have to find out for themselves,” he said, “when they can’t sell their house.”
I hadn’t heard that kind of pessimism from Mr. Kirtman when I met him four years ago while covering the governor’s race. I wondered whether Facebook hadn’t contributed to hardening positions, with increasing talk of the “deep state” providing denialists with a fresh line of attack.
That sort of conspiracy-mongering was part of why Ms. Gill said she had decided to post videos of the red tide carnage in Naples.
She knew that in the “fake news” era doubters could accuse her of doctoring evidence, so she came up with a solution: “I decided to do it on Facebook Live, so people couldn’t be like, ‘You made that up,’” she told me.
Still, not everyone was convinced by her posts, which have at times been met by ridicule, vitriol and ugly name-calling.
On the other hand, as the arrival of television news crews suggested, she seemed to be breaking through.
By the end of my time with Ms. Gill, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared that 42 dolphins had died in the previous 10 days. And a new emergency was breaking out. Sea birds — including sandwich terns and common terns — were dropping out of the sky, dying by the hundreds.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/02/business/media/climate-change-news-media-red-tide-florida.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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