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This week, one of the most popular radio hosts in the country issued a dire warning about Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 storm barreling its way through Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Though it could diverge from its predicted path, modeling from meteorologists says the storm will most likely crash into South Florida over the weekend.
The ominous warning from conservative fire starter Rush Limbaugh was this: Don't trust those meteorologists.
On his daily syndicated radio show Tuesday, Limbaugh claimed that forecasters and the media alike were overhyping the hurricane in a bid to juice retail sales at stores in South Florida.
“The reason that I am leery of forecasts this far out, folks,” Limbaugh said, “is because I see how the system works.”
Limbaugh went on to explain that this is a “symbiotic relationship.”
“The media benefits with the panic with increased eyeballs, and the retailers benefit from the panic with increased sales,” he said, “and the TV companies benefit because they’re getting advertising dollars from the businesses that are seeing all this attention from customers.”
The Washington Post's Callum Borchers put Limbaugh's comments in Trump-era terms: "Limbaugh didn't say the magic words, but on Tuesday he basically accused the media of creating fake news about Hurricane Irma.”
Weather communicators, including celebrity weatherman Al Roker, piled on to point out that Limbaugh's comments were dangerous if heeded by his listeners — if, that is, some of them ignored evacuation orders from authorities they see as corrupted by the meteorology-industrial complex.
But Limbaugh was undeterred. On Wednesday's show, he denied being a “hurricane denier,” and lambasted those who made the accusation, including The Post.
For Limbaugh, the criticism was proof that “people are using this storm to advance the climate change agenda.” He placed those who accept the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet alongside FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver and other presidential election oddsmakers as examples of “the left ... gone insane.”
This is not a lone conspiratorial theory about this storm. On his own show, Alex Jones of Infowars began a segment this week by claiming, "I’m not saying Irma is geoengineered.”
But he went on to suggest it may have been.
After noting that a science-fiction film about weather control called “Geostorm” is premiering in October, Jones said he thought the timing of the film was suspect.
“Isn’t that just perfect timing?” Jones said. “Like all these race war films they’ve been putting out. This is starting to get suspicious.”
What's going on? Social science offers an explanation as to why those who reject the consensus view among climate scientists may also tend to mistrust the motives of hurricane forecasters.
A 2013 survey found those who reject climate change science also have a tendency to endorse conspiracy theories, including ideas like that the moon landing was filmed in a Hollywood studio or that the U.S. government staged the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"People who don’t accept the consensus behind climate change tend to have a cluster of conspiracy views," said John Cook, a research assistant professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University and co-author of a follow-up study.
Indeed, such people sometimes bring conspiratorial thinking to their assessment of climate change policy. Jones, for example, has claimed in previous shows that the goal of the 2015 Paris climate talks was to bring about “global taxes" and “global government," neither of which were the outcome of the international agreement that followed.
While outlandish in their details, Cook said, the arguments from Limbaugh and Jones about Hurricane Irma demonstrate classic traits of conspiratorial thinking, such as a belief in a nefarious cabal and "drawing lines between random facts."
Neither Limbaugh nor Jones present any evidence that their theories are true — that, respectively, meteorologists and retailers, or geoengineers and filmmakers, are conspiring to somehow make a buck. What they do present are worldviews that imagine this unprecedented storm as impossible without the help of some behind-the-scenes ne'er-do-wells.
If you reject a scientific consensus, Cook said, "you really have no recourse other than to believe that they’re all in a conspiracy."
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