Right wing succeeds in misinforming public

Regarding “Climate change moving faster than predicted” [News, Jan. 12], why is anyone surprised? Twenty years ago, no one predicted that powerful forces would come together to make the situation worse, but now it has become self-evident.

For more than a decade we’ve seen the success of the “deniers.” The Cheney-Bush administration, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the theocratic fundamentalists of the Republican Party, etc. — what then-first lady Hillary Clinton correctly identified in the late 1990s as “a vast right-wing conspiracy” — have achieved their goal of spreading disinformation for the sake of short-term profit.

The climate-prediction models were based on “suppose we do nothing,” but what we have today is “let’s try really hard to make it as bad as possible.” This approach was successful.

--James Freudiger, Seattle