On Tuesday, PolitiFact showed why Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was right to end the company’s partnership with its fact-checking partners. Writer Caleb McCullough gave Donald Trump Jr. a “false” rating because he ran afoul of his preferred experts while ignoring experts who may have given him another perspective. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel claimed during an attack on Speaker Mike Johnson that snow in the South is proof climate change is real.
The main point of McCullough’s article was that:
Climate scientists PolitiFact spoke to disagreed with Trump Jr. and said climate change contributed to the Los Angeles fires’ size and destructiveness. Numerous studies have linked human-caused climate change to the western U.S.’ worsening wildfires.
In a Jan. 13 analysis, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles attributed about 25% of the brush dryness around Los Angeles to human-caused climate change. Increased heat over the summer and fall dried out the brush that fueled the fire, the report said.
In the study, that 25 percent is blamed on “anomalous heat” from the summer, but despite being under a bolded headline reading "The Role of Climate Change," the study also says, “Further research is needed to understand how the factors above combined to produce the observed behavior of the January 2025 fires, including the overall contribution of the factors’ climate-change components.”
McCullough also writes, “The strong Santa Ana winds that worsened the fires in their initial days were stronger than usual for this time of year, but not unprecedented and not attributable to climate change, the report said.”
In other words, it was a hotter summer, but McCullough tried to force a climate change conclusion with a comparison between fall and winter fires started by humans and exacerbated by high winds and summer fires further north caused by lightning strikes. Another perspective would be a group of eight scientists, who nobody could credibly describe as right-wing science deniers, writing in Science Magazine in 2021 that “One hundred percent of SAW fires were human caused, and in the past decade, powerline failures have been the dominant cause.”
Some experts are apparently more valuable than others. Meanwhile, PolitiFact hasn’t fact-checked Jimmy Kimmel since 2019, but they may want to after Wednesday night. During an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity, Johnson declared, “Yeah, we're talking about conditions to this disaster aid. Look, they're natural disasters, but there are man-made disasters as well.”
Putting the conditions debate to one side, Johnson is correct and, as noted above, it is not science denialism to say so. However, Kimmel angrily retorted, “And which one are you? Because you would think, as people living in an area prone to wildfires, we'd get a bit more sympathy from an elf who lives in a hollowed-out tree, but that doesn't fly in MAGAland. Mike Johnson is such a little kiss-ass. I've been trying to figure out who he reminds me of.”
Putting up a picture of Jabba the Hutt and Salacious B. Crumb, Kimmel continued, “I think it's this guy. Yes. There's Donald and Mike. The fact of the matter is the only man-made part of this disaster is the climate change part of this disaster, which Mike's party pretends doesn't exist, even though they're having snowball fights on Bourbon Street today.”
Climate change is real because the summer was hotter than before, but also real because the winter is colder and snowier. It’s heads they win, tails you lose.