I’m a fan of fact-checking, of fact checking, of this practice which requires journalism to carefully check everyone’s statements. Are these statements false, are they exaggerated, are they just inaccurate, or are they correct? It is up to the journalist to verify, investigate and clarify. This doesn’t just concern those in government, but the journalists themselves.
I remember that a few years I was visiting the editorial office of a large American publisher and I saw a room full of people. I asked: “And what do these do?”. Answer: “They fact-checkthey check everything we publish before it is printed”. They checked the work of their colleagues, in short. I am a fan of fact-checking because the truth of the facts matters, but I have learned that it is not enough. It is not enough to fight misinformation. If someone is convinced that vaccines are bad for you, you can do all the fact-checking in the world, but he won’t change his mind. The same happens with climate change deniers. In this case we have the scientific data, the numbers, the graphs. But in history no one has ever mobilized for a histogram. We also have alarms and news for increasingly frequent extreme climate events. Floods, typhoons, droughts. But people develop a kind of immunity towards this news: after a while they become indifferent. It happens like with wars: on the first day we are shocked, in the following days we lose sleep, but after a month we forget about the war.
Climate change lacks a story. There is no border to reach. There is no hope. And credible leadership is lacking. The climate war is a war to which we have become accustomed and in which we have lost interest because we have the sensation of not being able to do anything about it. The result is paradoxical. A photo of two forest rangers who were immortalized while laughing in front of a sign indicating the temperature: 55 degrees has been circulating on social media for a few months. Below it says: “They are like dinosaurs who have their photo taken with the asteroid.”