Ext User(B0NZ0)
09-04-2008, 07:36 AM
More Blatant Media Bias To Come In 2008
In 2008, A 100 Percent Chance Of Alarm
John Tierney
January 1, 2008
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/science/01tier.html
I'd like to wish you a happy New Year, but I'm afraid I have a
different sort of prediction.
You're in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring
you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global
warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of
dangerous climate change -- and that these images are a mere preview of
what's in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.
Unfortunately, I can't be more specific. I don't know if disaster will
come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I
have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that
means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain
short-term weather.
But there's bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will
react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their
ship, they didn't ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They
quickly identified the cause (Jonah's sinfulness) and agreed to an
appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).
Today's interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call
availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-
savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for
newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil
fuels.
A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the
buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on
record. At year's end, even though the British scientists reported the
global temperature average was not a new record -- it was actually
lower than any year since 2001 -- the BBC confidently proclaimed, "2007
Data Confirms Warming Trend."
When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded
by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole
planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the
highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored.
A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most
coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has
warmed.
When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to
be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate
modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm -- by
some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest
in three decades -- the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject.
Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of
climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have
more, not less, precipitation over all).
The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that
the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has
indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of
greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact
on the public.
When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what's called the
availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many
examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we
overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash
because we've seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we
underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don't have
so many vivid images readily available.
Slow warming doesn't make for memorable images on television or in
people's minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked
to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have
used these images to start an "availability cascade," a term coined by
Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of
Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the
University of Chicago.
The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more
attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to
more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made
terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished
attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three
Mile Island and "The China Syndrome," minor malfunctions at nuclear
power plants suddenly became newsworthy.
"Many people concerned about climate change," Dr. Sunstein says, "want
to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people's
minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be
others. I don't doubt that climate change is real and that it presents
a serious threat, but there's a danger that any 'consensus' on
particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade."
Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks
because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and
are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the
symbol of global warming, there's not much interest in hearing other
explanations of why the ice is melting -- or why the globe's other pole
isn't melting, too.
Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they're also
strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents.
Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that
much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical
change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively
little attention -- and were certainly no match for the images of
struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.
Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the
University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception
received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between
hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a
paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only
3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.
Guess which paper jibed with the theory -- and image of Katrina --
presented by Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth"?
It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which
suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper
in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on
hurricanes. It was published in December -- by coincidence, the same
week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn't dwell on the complexities of
the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he
mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded
somewhat mysteriously to "stronger storms in the Atlantic and
Pacific," and focused on other kinds of disasters, like "massive
droughts" and "massive flooding."
"In the last few months," Mr. Gore said, "it has been harder and
harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of
kilter." But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability
entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier
and easier.
--
Get The TRUE Facts At
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/index.html
Excellent Links At
http://www.warwickhughes.com/
Regards
Bonzo
"If the atmosphere was a 100 story building, our annual anthropogenic
CO2
contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first
floor"
D'Aleo
"...and I think future generations are not going to blame us for
anything except for being silly, for letting a few tenths of a degree
panic us"
Dr. Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology MIT and Member of the
National Academy of Sciences
"What most commentators-and many scientists-seem to miss is that the
only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes"
Dr. Richard Lindzen
[most of the current alarm over climate change is based on] "inherently
untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately
forecast the weather a week from now." Dr. Richard Lindzen
In 2008, A 100 Percent Chance Of Alarm
John Tierney
January 1, 2008
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/science/01tier.html
I'd like to wish you a happy New Year, but I'm afraid I have a
different sort of prediction.
You're in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring
you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global
warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of
dangerous climate change -- and that these images are a mere preview of
what's in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.
Unfortunately, I can't be more specific. I don't know if disaster will
come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I
have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that
means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain
short-term weather.
But there's bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will
react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their
ship, they didn't ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They
quickly identified the cause (Jonah's sinfulness) and agreed to an
appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).
Today's interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call
availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-
savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for
newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil
fuels.
A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the
buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on
record. At year's end, even though the British scientists reported the
global temperature average was not a new record -- it was actually
lower than any year since 2001 -- the BBC confidently proclaimed, "2007
Data Confirms Warming Trend."
When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded
by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole
planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the
highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored.
A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most
coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has
warmed.
When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to
be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate
modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm -- by
some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest
in three decades -- the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject.
Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of
climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have
more, not less, precipitation over all).
The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that
the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has
indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of
greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact
on the public.
When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what's called the
availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many
examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we
overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash
because we've seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we
underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don't have
so many vivid images readily available.
Slow warming doesn't make for memorable images on television or in
people's minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked
to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have
used these images to start an "availability cascade," a term coined by
Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of
Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the
University of Chicago.
The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more
attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to
more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made
terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished
attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three
Mile Island and "The China Syndrome," minor malfunctions at nuclear
power plants suddenly became newsworthy.
"Many people concerned about climate change," Dr. Sunstein says, "want
to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people's
minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be
others. I don't doubt that climate change is real and that it presents
a serious threat, but there's a danger that any 'consensus' on
particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade."
Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks
because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and
are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the
symbol of global warming, there's not much interest in hearing other
explanations of why the ice is melting -- or why the globe's other pole
isn't melting, too.
Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they're also
strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents.
Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that
much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical
change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively
little attention -- and were certainly no match for the images of
struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.
Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the
University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception
received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between
hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a
paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only
3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.
Guess which paper jibed with the theory -- and image of Katrina --
presented by Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth"?
It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which
suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper
in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on
hurricanes. It was published in December -- by coincidence, the same
week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn't dwell on the complexities of
the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he
mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded
somewhat mysteriously to "stronger storms in the Atlantic and
Pacific," and focused on other kinds of disasters, like "massive
droughts" and "massive flooding."
"In the last few months," Mr. Gore said, "it has been harder and
harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of
kilter." But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability
entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier
and easier.
--
Get The TRUE Facts At
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/index.html
Excellent Links At
http://www.warwickhughes.com/
Regards
Bonzo
"If the atmosphere was a 100 story building, our annual anthropogenic
CO2
contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first
floor"
D'Aleo
"...and I think future generations are not going to blame us for
anything except for being silly, for letting a few tenths of a degree
panic us"
Dr. Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology MIT and Member of the
National Academy of Sciences
"What most commentators-and many scientists-seem to miss is that the
only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes"
Dr. Richard Lindzen
[most of the current alarm over climate change is based on] "inherently
untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately
forecast the weather a week from now." Dr. Richard Lindzen