THE INTERNET HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS A GREAT EQUALIZER. Everyone with a connection can have a voice, whereas in the past the words of only a select few trickled out to the masses. In many ways, this is indeed a wonderful thing. In some ways—YouTube comment sections, say—it is not.
Just as with other topics, when it comes to science the Internet’s essentially level playing field is a mixed bag. If you have a question about science, chances are there are resources online that can answer it, to the extent humanity is able to provide an answer. But chances are just as good that some source online can answer it incorrectly. For every Mayo Clinic, Science.gov, or NOVA website, there is a Mercola.com or Infowars muddying the waters. (Do not visit these last two—ever.)
Just as for the rest of us, picking out the good science from the bad can be tough for elected officials. And even if politicians know that a certain source may not be the best, sometimes they’re not afraid to use it anyway. This is the BLAME THE BLOGGER—when a politician repeats information from often terrifically dubious sources, with the knowledge that many people simply won’t know how to check the underlying science. It’s online, so it must be true!
In one example of this tactic from early 2015, an Alabama congressman named Gary Palmer went on a radio show and said some very wrong things about climate change and climate science. The host, Matt Murphy, set Palmer up expertly by asking him in traditional (for the TOADS, anyway) guffawing fashion his opinion on the relationship between snowstorms in the Northeast and climate change. He responded:
I think it might be a matter of the report that came out last week about the government manipulating data and misleading people a little bit. But two feet of snow ought to get their attention. . . . We are building an entire agenda on falsified data that will have an enormous impact on the economy.1
A report that the government is “manipulating” and “falsifying” data? Well, that sounds horrific! It was not remotely true, of course, but Palmer didn’t pull this out of absolutely nowhere; the Internet told him!
In fact, the claim of temperature data manipulation (which has popped up a number of times over the years) in this case originated with a blogger and climate denier named Paul Homewood. There was no “report,” no official document or peer-reviewed research. It was just, to be crude, some guy online. (There is very little information about Homewood available on his website or elsewhere; one article about his work called him a retired accountant,2 and there is no indication that he has any expertise in climate science.)
Homewood wrote several blog posts with titles such as “Massive Tampering with Temperatures in South America.”3 His blog wasn’t exactly CNN’s home page in terms of traffic, so that incendiary headline might have remained obscure if it hadn’t been for a TOAD with a bigger audience, Christopher Booker, writing for the Telegraph, a London newspaper. Booker covered Homewood’s work and even managed to one-up him in the headline battle: “The Fiddling with Temperature Data Is the Biggest Science Scandal Ever.”4 Ever! Booker’s stories were shared hundreds of thousands of times, and seized upon by TOADS everywhere.
Well, okay, what scandalous fiddling had Homewood and Booker brought to the world’s attention? As it turns out, the process these shrill doomsayers had uncovered could easily be labeled “science.” More specifically, Booker described a well-studied, well-understood process regarding temperature measurements—one that was not hidden from the public or from other scientists in any way, shape, or form.
See, taking the world’s temperature is exceptionally complicated. There is not just one giant thermometer out there, offering up readings that paint a full picture of planetary temps. As we discussed in Chapter 2, it requires a vast network of weather stations around the globe, satellites sending readings back from above, and thermometers on buoys and ships gathering data over the oceans.
What’s more, all those measurements coming in from all those instruments aren’t perfect. Imagine you placed four thermometers on your kitchen table, evenly spaced apart, and recorded the temperature from each several times a day. But one of the thermometers sat right underneath a window, meaning sunlight streamed over it for almost all of its readings, while the other thermometers saw sunshine for only part of the day, if at all. Clearly, your four instruments would offer differing readings for the temperature inside your kitchen—not an accurate representation of the situation.
An ocean-based climate station, maintained by NOAA.
Credit: NOAA News Dec 2010
To fix that problem, you could adjust the readings. With careful work, you could figure out a specific amount that the sunny thermometer might have to be adjusted downward in order to let it give an actual, accurate reading of the ambient temperature. If the adjustment was done well, the sunny thermometer would agree with the other three thermometers, since they are all measuring temperatures inside the same small room.
On a global scale, scientists engage in a version of this process known as homogenization. The various weather stations and instrumentation often require adjustment in order to—and this is important—provide accurate readings, not to manipulate the readings to get a desired result. Also, scientists have been taking these measurements for a very long time; the primary record goes back to 1880, with some specific weather stations dating back even farther than that. The physical, logistical situations at those stations can, of course, change over time, again making adjustment necessary. Go back to your four kitchen thermometers: after spending a week recording temperatures, let’s say your aunt gives you a lamp for Christmas, which you set on the corner of the table to improve the room’s lighting. That lamp is now almost directly over another thermometer, clearly raising its readings; again, an adjustment is obviously warranted to try to get the most accurate measurement.
In the case of weather stations, sometimes buildings go up next door, which could change shadows or even wind patterns around the instrumentation. Scientists again must adjust the readings to correct for such factors.
Back to Homewood and Booker, and the biggest science scandal ever: Homewood reported that he had looked at the raw temperature data for a few weather stations in Paraguay. He had found that the raw data showed a cooling trend over time, but the adjusted, official data show a warming trend. In other words, those meddling scientists had somehow created warming out of nothing. Shocking! Homewood later went back and found other stations where the same thing had happened: a cooling or flat temperature trend turned into a warming trend, which to him and Booker showed a clear attempt to manipulate scientific data to fit the desired narrative.
Booker really did find a cooling trend that turned into a warming trend. Are we sure that’s not in the least bit scandalous?
Yes. We are sure.
The process of homogenization of temperature data has been well studied, and both the raw and adjusted data are publicly available for others to examine. And others have indeed examined the data. For example, a nonprofit group called Berkeley Earth has found that issues with temperature data “did not unduly bias the record.”5 This assessment may carry more weight than it would coming from another source because Berkeley Earth was founded specifically as a skeptical organization by scientists who had concerns about the consensus surrounding global warming. So they did their own work with the available data and came to essentially the same conclusions as NOAA, NASA, and other major climate science organizations. Richard Muller, the primary scientist involved at Berkeley Earth, even wrote a New York Times op-ed entitled “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.”6
Others have also analyzed the homogenization process of temperature data. One study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 2012 concluded that, if there is any error in the data, it actually has served to underestimate the warming trend.7 In other words, the temperature adjustments have been too conservative, and the real temperature may be even higher than we think.
An earlier paper in the same journal specifically looked for any indication that the weather stations in the United States were inflating temperature trends. Their conclusion, again, was that no such inflation was occurring and that temperature data were robust and accurate.8
And here’s one more study that shows clearly why Homewood’s “analysis” is flawed. In 2011, researchers from NOAA published a paper analyzing the entire Global Historical Climatology Network’s data set, which, as the name suggests, is the temperature record for the entire globe. They examined 7,279 total stations that recorded temperature data for some period dating all the way back to 1801, and found that at least one “bias correction” was applied to 3,297 of them.9 Moreover, those thousands of adjustments to temperature data were not part of a sinister plot to raise the temperatures. The study showed that those thousands of adjustments happened in the positive and negative directions at about an equal rate—hardly the mark of villains creating a warming trend out of nothing.
Of course, all of this evidence doesn’t matter when you have a viral article like Booker’s, emblazoned with fiery rhetoric, as your source. Congressman Palmer was simply repeating what’s available online, and not just at obscure sites but in a major newspaper; it was a subtle bit of wordplay on Palmer’s part to rename the blog posts a “report,” to make them sound all the more official.
Even a conscientious, curious listener to that radio show may have had trouble getting to the truth; a particularly insidious part of the BLAME THE BLOGGER is that the original mistakes, misconceptions, or outright lies are likely easily accessible with the simplest Google search. Looking online for something like “manipulated temperature records” or “falsified climate data” takes a reader straight to those inaccurate stories, giving them a further air of credibility.10
The Internet lets anyone publish anything at all without verification, and once that “report” gets out there, politicians like Gary Palmer can parrot a bogus talking point even after it’s been debunked. After all, the Internet still has his back.
GLOBAL WARMING IS A PRIME candidate for the BLAME THE BLOGGER, as there is simply a monumental pile of, well, crap written about it online. To a politician eager to maintain his or her skeptic cred, the Internet is an absolute gold mine of believable-sounding nonsense about climate change.
Here’s another example from former Pennsylvania senator, 2012 and 2016 presidential candidate, and prominent TOAD Rick Santorum. In August 2015, he appeared on Bill Maher’s show on HBO and confirmed that he did not actually think climate change is a serious problem:
And I’m not alone. The most recent survey of climate scientists said about 57 percent don’t agree with the idea that 95 percent of the change in the climate is being caused by CO2. . . . There was a survey done of 1,800 scientists, and 57 percent said they don’t buy off on the idea that CO2 is the knob that’s turning the climate. There’s hundreds of reasons the climate’s changing.11
Santorum was aiming to poke a hole in a statistic you might have heard, regarding the scientific consensus on climate change. The commonly cited number is 97 percent: only three out of every hundred scientists in the field, the idea goes, do not agree that climate change is happening and that humans are primarily responsible. You can find this number on the lips of any number of activists, politicians, even NASA’s website.12 So Santorum’s claim that more than half of scientists are actually not on board with mainstream climate science would be a truly dramatic departure.
Far too dramatic, as it turns out. Santorum’s statistics sounded unlikely enough that Bill Maher had an appropriately skeptical response: “Rick, I don’t know what ass you’re pulling that out of.” Well, it turns out the “ass” in question is—you guessed it—some random site on the Internet!
The site in question is called Fabius Maximus, a blog written by a collection of retired military personnel, finance types, and one or two anonymous writers. These are not climate scientists. In fact, they don’t seem to be scientists or statisticians of any kind. Why would a nationally visible politician quote them? Well, when you can get someone else to take serious liberties with data and twist findings into knots for you, the real question is, why not?
In July 2015, the Fabius Maximus bloggers posted about a survey conducted by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.13 According to Fabius Maximus, the survey purportedly showed that a minority of climate scientists agreed with the primary finding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Or, as their grabby headline put it, “The 97% Consensus of Climate Scientists Is Only 47%.”14
Grabby, yes. Realistic? Not even close. The key factor that allowed the bloggers to distort this questionnaire’s findings is that the survey (which included 1,868 responses from climate scientists of varying expertise and experience) had some room for nuance—it did not involve simple yes-or-no questions. For example, here is question 1a, about the portion of observed global warming that can be attributed to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions:
1a Attribution
What fraction of global warming since the mid-20th century can be attributed to human induced increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations?
• More than 100% (i.e. GHG warming has been partly offset by aerosol cooling)
• Between 76% and 100%
• Between 51% and 76%
• Between 26% and 50%
• Between 0 and 25%
• Less than 0% (i.e. anthropogenic GHG emissions have caused cooling)
• There has been no warming
• Unknown due to lack of knowledge
• I do not know
• Other (please specify)
Credit: Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
The second question, which was dependent on the response to the first, asked respondents to ascribe a confidence level to their answer. The FM bloggers’ primary bit of statistical mischief involved two of the possible responses to question 1a: “I do not know” and “Unknown.” The bloggers assumed that those answers—accounting for 9.9 and 8.8 percent of those who responded to the question—meant the respondents did not agree with the basic premise that humans are primarily responsible for climate change. The actual authors of the study, though, disagreed. They pointed out that selecting those less certain responses does not necessarily mean that respondents don’t agree with the premise, but instead could indicate that respondents believe pinpointing the exact amount of warming caused by humans could be difficult.
That disagreement, as it turns out, completely changes the conclusions of the survey. The FM bloggers took only those respondents whose answer to question 1a was that the human contribution exceeded 50 percent and who then said it was either “virtually certain” or “extremely likely” that the 50 percent mark was true, and divided that number (which turned out to be 797 individuals) into the full 1,868-scientist cohort. The result: 43 percent agree with the consensus, and 57 disagree. Voilà, a Rick Santorum sound bite.
There was actually another problem with the Fabius Maximus analysis: by allowing only “virtually certain” or “extremely likely” in question 2, they misstated the actual current state of consensus. See, the Netherlands survey was conducted in 2012, before the release of the latest IPCC report. The previous report, from 2007, maintained the official conclusion that it was “very likely” that human-caused emissions had caused most of the observed warming; it was only with the 2013 version that “extremely likely” became the consensus finding. These terms carry specific meanings: “very likely” means greater than a 90 percent probability; “extremely likely” means more than 95 percent; and “virtually certain” means 99 percent or above. If the FM writers wanted to be accurate, they should have included the survey respondents who said it was “very likely” as well; that would have raised their conclusion from 43 percent all the way to 67 percent.
The original authors of the survey arrived at very different—and higher—numbers by being more careful and precise. They excluded those “I don’t know” and “Unknown” answers entirely and then divided up the respondents according to how many papers they had published on climate science—a crude but reasonable method for determining how much a person knows about the field. They found a range of consensus from 79 to 97 percent; the lower number was only among those who had published zero to three papers, while the highest percentage was among those intimately involved with the IPCC process. One might call the latter group “experts.”
In total, the percentage agreeing with the consensus was 84 percent—a far cry from the 57 percent disagreement Santorum claimed. Yet the deviousness of the BLAME THE BLOGGER was clear from Maher’s response: even someone who is aware of the science, and wholly skeptical of the denier claims, couldn’t immediately rebut Santorum’s point. Average viewers of the show likely wouldn’t know where to look to see whether Santorum was correct, and again, a Google search for related terms might lead them to the incorrect source. Santorum could crouch behind the Internet, comfortable that few would do the math to peel back the curtain on his hiding place.
SOMETIMES THE “BLOGGER” in question is the author of a 1975 magazine article. Yes, this is a bit of a deviation from the narrative that has the Internet’s level playing field as a culprit, but the “global cooling” myth persists less because of the specific articles from decades ago and more from the recurring citation of them by writers online today.
The common refrain is that in the 1970s, scientists warned of a coming apocalypse: the world was cooling down thanks to human-caused emissions—so much so that we could be headed for a new ice age that would kill crops and render large parts of the world uninhabitable. Obviously, that dire prediction didn’t come to pass, and the scientists all shifted their viewpoint from cooling to warming. Why should we trust them now if they just love to shout that the sky is falling, picking a new bogeyman every few decades?
The answer is that very few actually were concerned about global cooling, and though the science was still in its infancy, even in the 1970s most were more concerned that a warming trend was on the horizon than the opposite. But that hasn’t stopped politicians from squawking about this. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has mentioned it, as we learned in the Introduction, among many others. Here’s Ted Cruz with another version:
I read this morning a Newsweek article from the 1970s talking about global cooling. And it said the science is clear, it is overwhelming, we are in a major cooling period and it’s going to cause enormous problems worldwide. . . . Now, the data proved to be not backing up that theory. So then all the advocates of global cooling suddenly shifted to global warming.15
There was indeed a Newsweek article that said essentially those things—a single-page piece published on April 28, 1975.16 It was, in fact, quite ominous in tone, but the story’s author himself, a journalist named Peter Gwynne, has since thoroughly distanced himself from it. Writing for Inside Science in 2014, Gwynne said:
Here I must admit mea culpa. In retrospect, I was over-enthusiastic in parts of my Newsweek article. Thus, I suggested a connection between the purported global cooling and increases in tornado activity that was unjustified by climate science. I also predicted a forthcoming impact of global cooling on the world’s food production that had scant research to back it.
The messages for science writers are to ask questions beyond the obvious and to seek out what the science doesn’t imply as well as what it does. If I had applied those lessons back in 1975, I might not now be in the embarrassing position of being a cat’s paw for denial of climate change.17
Gwynne added that “those that reject [current] climate science ignore the fact that, like other fields, climatology has evolved since 1975.” In short, the article was wrong, both in content and in tone. (For completeness, Time also published a global cooling article, in 1974,18 that occasionally is brought up in a similar fashion. As we’ll see, neither article was properly representing what scientists actually thought.)
The fundamental question here is not whether popular magazine articles were overblown, but whether the scientists studying these topics believed what Cruz says they believed. And interestingly enough, some actual research has looked into this question. In a literature review published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 2008, researchers assessed how many peer-reviewed papers published between 1965 and 1979 seemed to favor a global cooling scenario, a global warming scenario, or “neutral” temperature trends.19 The results were clear.
Throughout that period, fewer than ten peer-reviewed papers were published with cooling as the focus. Meanwhile, twenty “neutral” papers appeared, and forty-four papers indicated a warming trend; by the end of the 1970s the slant toward papers on warming seemed more pronounced, with no cooling papers at all appearing in 1978 or 1979. Does this sound like “all the advocates of global cooling” were a majority, who later just jumped ship and switched to Team Warming?
In reality, the scientific community was already well aware of the impending warming problem. A 1979 report from the National Research Council, which is part of the National Academies, already issued fairly dire warnings regarding the warming world: “A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late.”20 Humanity may want a do-over on that one, unfortunately.
Just as with the more modern examples of the BLAME THE BLOGGER, McConnell, Cruz, and others who beat this particular horse rely on the fact that few are going to check their work. Online, it is incredibly easy to find the “global cooling” scares from Time and Newsweek, as well as comments from countless TOADS blogging about them in recent years, and far more difficult to find literature reviews or actual studies from the 1970s poking holes in the idea that an enormous consensus had formed. Climate science has, of course, progressed since 1975, but arguing that a couple of magazine articles somehow undercut the entire scientific enterprise is a bit beyond the pale.
IT IS NOT JUST CLIMATE CHANGE—and it is not just blog posts or news articles—that can yield BLAME THE BLOGGER fodder for opportunistic politicians. In the summer of 2015, the Internet exploded with news of undercover videos purporting to reveal some shocking practices taking place at Planned Parenthood clinics. Politicians on the right seized on these videos with vigor, repeating some truly incendiary rhetoric and making claims that the facts simply couldn’t support.
The videos, made by a group run by anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, called the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), supposedly unveiled the shady world of “selling baby parts”—the concept that abortion providers were taking aborted fetal tissue and profiting off its sale to researchers, sometimes without consent of the mothers. This was a drastic and utterly morbid twisting of the truth, and one that arguably began a backlash against Planned Parenthood that resulted in violence. The lack of truth in the videos, however, did not stop politicians such as Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, and Rick Perry from citing them as fact. Again: it’s on the Internet; therefore it’s true.
There were many specific allegations and claims made regarding the Planned Parenthood videos, but the most fundamental and oft repeated was that the clinics were making a profit off the sale of aborted fetuses. Here is Rick Perry in July 2014:
The video showing a Planned Parenthood employee selling the body parts of aborted children is a disturbing reminder of the organization’s penchant for profiting off the tragedy of a destroyed human life.21
Carly Fiorina made a similar claim:
This latest news is tragic and outrageous. This isn’t about “choice.” It’s about profiting on the death of the unborn while telling women it’s about empowerment.22
Rand Paul chimed in as well, tweeting out supposedly incriminating quotes from “a video showing [Planned Parenthood]’s top doctor describing how she performs late-term abortions to sell body parts for profit!”23
And so on; other politicians made similar statements regarding sale and profit. The supposed evidence for such claims was in the highly edited videos of Planned Parenthood executives and doctors having lunch with a fake tissue procurement organization that Daleiden had created (using a fake name). The videos, running about ten minutes long, based on hours-long raw footage, used dramatic on-screen text and black-and-white replays and generally painted a picture of a singularly evil organization hell-bent on creating a black-market trade in dead babies. It was convincing propaganda.
Several lines in the videos inflamed the politicians on this issue. The first and most widely disseminated video features a Planned Parenthood doctor named Deborah Nucatola. In what is indeed a cavalier and somewhat careless tone, she is shown discussing the dollar amounts that a clinic should be reimbursed per fetal tissue specimen; specifically, she cites a range of $30–$100.
On its own, this statement makes for a compelling case. Perry, Paul, and Fiorina didn’t bother discussing the details of those dollar amounts, instead focusing on the concept of sale or profit. But the edited videos declined to show a whole host of other lines from Nucatola decrying the entire idea of profit, instead insisting that clinics are only looking to recover costs.
Here’s the important, fundamental point about all of this: fetal tissue donation from abortions is legal, and financial remuneration to cover costs—but not to profit—is also perfectly allowed under federal law. The reason it is legal is that fetal tissue has historically been a hugely useful source of scientific discovery. Fetal cells are in some ways uniquely suited for certain research pursuits. Here’s how the American Society for Cell Biology describes their utility:
Fetal cells hold unique promise for biomedical research due to their ability to rapidly divide, grow, and adapt to new environments. This makes fetal tissue research relevant to a wide variety of diseases and medical conditions.24
Fetal tissue has been used to develop vaccines against measles and rubella, and even to help grow the polio vaccine. The 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists—John Franklin Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller, and Frederick Chapman Robbins—who discovered that the poliovirus could grow in fetal tissue cells.25 Their work showed that large quantities of the polio vaccine could be grown quickly—an important step in eradication of the disease in the United States.26
Many other examples illustrate the usefulness of this type of tissue. The legality of fetal tissue donation was enshrined in a 1993 law called the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act.27 Among its various provisions was a section on fetal tissue donation, making it legal as long as certain requirements are met. The law specifies that “valuable consideration” for the tissue donation is not allowed, and goes on to make exceptions to that term:
The term “valuable consideration” does not include reasonable payments associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue.
Okay, but Dr. Nucatola gives some specific numbers in the CMP video; do they represent “reasonable payments” or not? As it turns out, the answer is a fairly unequivocal yes.
A series of experts chimed in to FactCheck.org about what a reasonable amount of money might be in this scenario, and all agreed: the prices quoted in the video could in no way represent profit.28 Here’s Carolyn Compton, a former director of bio-repositories and biospecimen research at the National Cancer Institute, and the chief medical and science officer at Arizona State University’s National Biomarker Development Alliance:
“Profit” is out of the question, in my mind. I would say that whoever opined about “profit” knows very little about the effort and expense involved in providing human biospecimens for research purposes.
And here’s Sherilyn Sawyer, the director of Harvard University’s “biorepository”:
There’s no way there’s a profit at that price. . . . In reality, $30–100 probably constitutes a loss for [Planned Parenthood]. The costs associated with collection, processing, storage, and inventory and records management for specimens are very high. Most hospitals will provide tissue blocks from surgical procedures (ones no longer needed for clinical purposes, and without identity) for research, and cost recover for their time and effort in the range of $100–500 per case/block. In the realm of tissues for research $30–100 is completely reasonable and normal fee.
Objective research into the topic of fetal tissue procurement is limited, but there is evidence that those various experts are correct in their assessments. In a report released by the US General Accounting Office (later renamed the Government Accountability Office) in 2000, the GAO determined that, generally speaking, clinics did not charge researchers looking to use fetal tissue anything at all. When they did charge, the price ranged from a low of $2 to a high of $75, and it averaged $22.29
Add all this up—along with the fact that an extremely limited number of Planned Parenthood clinics in only two or three states have ever even been involved in fetal tissue donation—and it becomes clear that the accusations presented by the Center for Medical Progress and repeated by the GOP politicians were utterly hollow. But that didn’t matter to those politicians, especially given how contentious the issue of abortion is in this country.
They continued their fierce attacks for months following the release of CMP’s videos, always falling back on the idea that there was a source for their claims. “You can go watch the videos yourself, right there on the Internet! How can you deny what’s in them?” And it wasn’t just empty rhetoric: many in the GOP actually threatened to shut down the government if federal funds continued to flow to Planned Parenthood, ignoring the fact that no laws had been broken (multiple state investigations found no evidence of wrongdoing of any kind30), and Planned Parenthood is actually barred from using its federal funding specifically for abortions.
During one GOP debate in September 2016, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina took this particular BLAME THE BLOGGER to its extreme with a fiery description of what sounds like a truly horrific scene:
As regards [to] Planned Parenthood, anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain!31
By many accounts, Fiorina “won” the debate with this sort of incendiary rhetoric. The only problem is, that scene she described doesn’t exist, and never did.
One of the various CMP videos contains a short clip of what appears to be a not-yet-fully-formed fetus on a table, with “its legs kicking.” That same video contains a description of the scene Fiorina mentions, regarding harvesting a brain, by a former employee of a tissue procurement company. There is no way to verify the interviewee’s story, and the company she worked for vehemently denies any wrongdoing.32
The short clip of a fetus, it turns out, did not even come from CMP’s undercover footage. It came from a pro-life group called the Grantham Collection, and the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform. Those groups would not tell media where exactly the footage was shot, though they claimed that the writhing fetus was, in fact, the result of an abortion. Obstetrics experts, though, chimed in later, asserting that there was almost no chance the video showed an aborted fetus, but instead showed a miscarriage.33 Regardless, the scene as Fiorina described it—with evil, supposedly cackling demons insisting the fetus be kept alive to “harvest its brain”—simply never occurred. Daleiden and the CMP, of course, backed her in full—the blamed blogger, in this case, was on board with the politician.
A terrible postscript to this story took place a couple of months later: although a hard cause and effect can’t be determined, some felt that the inflammatory reactions to the CMP videos led to an act of domestic terrorism. Robert Dear, a possibly mentally ill man, killed several people at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic and reportedly said “no more baby parts” upon being captured by police.34 At a court hearing, he shouted: “I am a warrior for the babies.”35
The resultant violence is rare, but letting politicians spout whatever nonsense the Internet offers without challenge is indeed a slippery slope. The BLAME THE BLOGGER is in some ways a free pass for politicians to lie; if they are just quoting someone else’s claim, can you really blame them? We should blame them; politicians have a public influence that the average blogger does not wield, and they should be held to a higher standard when it comes to science. Calling out their repetitions of silly, ridiculous, or downright dangerous Internet nonsense can have wide-ranging impacts: stopping the spread of abortion-related misinformation could help reduce the possibility of extremist violence, for example, and building trust in climate science could help push for action, quite literally helping to save the world.