Comments on: More Liberal Media Bias

By: Lurker

Lurker — Mon, 31 May 2004 03:25:50 +0000

That’s right Lance. If you want to deal in totalities, it’ll either be that or totalitarian control of all the people on the planet.

By: Lance Boyle

Lance Boyle — Sun, 30 May 2004 20:48:47 +0000

Complete human domination and control of every bio-chemical process on the planet! Now! Quickly!

By: Sandals

Sandals — Sun, 30 May 2004 04:39:44 +0000

Considering the plankton blooms we’re experiencing in the oceans currently and the problems those cause, I don’t see plankton seeding as a good solution… Trees grow faster in the cities because there’s a LOT less trees around! No competition. I mean, i think any growth rate increase is more than cancelled out by the widespread destruction of forests, which have other serious effects, as can be seen in the mudslides in Haiti. Nuclear power development has its own problems. I’m actually a fan of nuclear power, but on a large scale it does produce several problems- a vast quantity of heated water dumped into rivers and oceans, with unknown effects- and of course waste disposal. The mess at Hanford is apalling as well. Several difficulties need to be worked out…

By: Lurker

Lurker — Sun, 30 May 2004 01:02:59 +0000

DSW,

we remain warm until nature has once again fossilized enough carbon to lower the carbon dioxid present in the athmosphere

The carbon doesn’t have to be fossilized; it just has to be sequestered. There are many ways to do this, like the growth of forests and grasslands. Much of this will happen naturally as extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is like fertilizer. Plants will grow faster. Studies have shown that trees grow faster in cities than in the country. The earth’s biosphere is self-regulating to an unexpected degree. It is possible to help this process. One way is to seed barren areas of the ocean with iron to encourage plankton growth. Another is the resumption of nuclear power development. Given all this, and the apparent peaking of population growth that is expected this century, complete pessimism is not called for; in fact, there is reason for much hope.

By: Xavier

Xavier — Sun, 30 May 2004 00:04:22 +0000

The real problem with the media is that reporters tend to begin with a vision of what their story should be and then they look for facts to fit that story. Since journalists tend to have moderate leftist views, their stories often reflect those views, but the ideological slant is less of a problem than the sloppy methodology itself. In this case, CNN wanted a quote from the most critical climatologist they could find because they were trying to play up the story of scientists criticizing the movie. The media’s bias in favor of sensationalism and controversy always trumps political bias.

By: Lance Boyle

Lance Boyle — Sat, 29 May 2004 21:08:56 +0000

:::wood s lot::: had this pertinent quote/entry from Walker Percy yesterday. It’s not the responsibility of poets and artists to tell scientifically factual stories. The atomic weights of things are not their identities. The constituent parts of things, however exhaustingly detailed the list, will never be as accurate as a name. Zeno’s grocery list is always incomplete. – Thank you Robbo, Andrew, though Andrew that cynical despair at the end of my anti-car thing should have answered your criticism. The causal relationship? I’m saying it is close to irrelevant. Like whether a starving junkie has AIDS or not is close to irrelevant. A couple of things never get acknowledged in the so-called debate about global warming. One is that the news itself has the potential to be so disheartening to the researchers on the front lines, and yet they’re treated by their critics like fans of an opposing soccer team, and shouted down with scorn and ridicule. Another is the subject, and the science, are beyond the layman entirely. Weather is a complex system whose subtleties and whose timeline are outside most of our perspectives. So we have to take our view from someone we trust, on faith as it were. So. When I said that: a. the auto/oil industry is so dominantly a part of the US/global economy it practically is the economy, and b. No reasonable person can expect unrestricted debate, purely on the evidence, I meant to point toward a change. We have to take the debate out of the agora, because the agora is owned and controlled by the industry we’re examining. Big Tobacco wasn’t a warm-up to this. It was the Foos-ball® version. The power radiating from the dark nucleus of the auto/oil kombinat sucks everything toward it. It isn’t about the men in the boardrooms or the families in their SUV’s. It’s the whole system. It operates outside the tentative framework of morality and reason. It’s a deity. Divine or Satanic I leave to the reader to decide, based on its attributes and effects.

By: robbo

robbo — Sat, 29 May 2004 21:07:20 +0000

Thomas, it’s fine for John Christy to have contrarian views, and I’m glad he didn’t misrepresent the mainstream view. But my inner cynic starts twitching at the prospect of John Christy becoming mainstream media’s “fair and balanced” voice on the topic of climate change. Because it appears he’s been hand-picked to make people feel good about an issue that most experts in his field don’t feel good about. It reminds me of the media’s once-beloved foreign policy experts who acknowledged in fall 2002 that our elective Iraq war certainly carried risks, but who nonetheless managed to reassure Americans that war represented the best available response to the situation. It wasn’t, and I don’t think that doing nothing represents our government’s most responsible approach to the prospect of climate change. CNN could have gotten a well-respected scientist who’s more of a Cassandra about the topic—do you think it’s just by chance that they didn’t?

By: Antoni Jaume

Antoni Jaume — Sat, 29 May 2004 20:37:37 +0000

lurker, global warming means that once we’re warm, we remain warm until nature has once again fossilized enough carbon to lower the carbon dioxid present in the athmosphere, and that may imply thousands, if not millions, of years. DSW

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 29 May 2004 20:26:03 +0000

No talking donkeys! The only possible world is the actual world, and there are no talking donkeys in it. More flexibly, we don’t know whether there could be a talking donkey, if by ‘talking’ we mean what Eddie Murphy can do, and by ‘donkey’ we mean a member of the relevant biological species. One might plausibly think that any sequence of mutations beginning with a donkey that could lead to capacities for propositional thought and vocal articulation would also lead to speciation, and we would end up with something that could talk, but which was not, strictly speaking, a donkey.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sat, 29 May 2004 16:22:47 +0000

I’m not sure why brickbats are appropriate for CNN. Is there a scientist somewhere who does think that the movie is plausible? If there’s no division within the profession on the plausibility of the movie’s scenario, then there’s no harm asking anyone in the profession. Further, when asked about for the views of the profession, Christy accurately described them, and then offered his own as a dissenting view.

By: Andrew Boucher

Andrew Boucher — Sat, 29 May 2004 16:02:50 +0000

Lance: Grown-ups vs babies indeed. Only I’m not sure which side is which. Global warming strikes me as analogous to Iraqi WMDs. They serve as the false pretext for policies which have many other reasons behind them. I guess the Bush administration took a copy from the European playbook… Notice the post of Lance. Rage against the automobile, consumption, the poisoning of the environment. I agree with all of it and accept that these are good reasons to put something like Kyoto into action (although I think the Europeans, as usual, rigged the game in their favor). None of his post, however, connects the automobile with global warming. It’s as if the causal link is irrelevant. But it’s precisely this causal link which strikes me as dubious – and so why it’s wrong-headed to use global warming as a justification to implement policies which we should implement anyway. (OK this would be where the analogy with Iraqi WMDs breaks down.)

By: Lurker

Lurker — Sat, 29 May 2004 15:46:36 +0000

What’s all the fuss about global warming? It’s a short-term problem at most. Petroleum will run out in 50 years, right? And any alternative fossil fuels 50 years after that. That’s a total of 200 years of global warming, tops. This is a very short time in climatological terms. Maybe by then, we’ll be over our phobia about nuclear power.

By: Erik

Erik — Sat, 29 May 2004 10:01:56 +0000

Talking donkeys are possible, and in fact, there exist an uncountable number of talking donkeys, though they are not spatiotemporally related to us. But other metaphysicians disagree on this point. :P

By: robbo

robbo — Sat, 29 May 2004 08:48:43 +0000

Fair enough, ayjay. I don’t need to read What Liberal Media? or Bias to know what’s what, from my own perspective. Perched here on the left—particularly on environmental issues—Brookings comes across as a supremely “centrist” Institution to me. Whatever. We all bring our own philosophy—a form of bias—to bear on every issue. Philosophy filters the steady stream of data, determining what warrants retention and emphasis in our personal mental frameworks. So long as we’re all being intellectually honest (to the extent we can be), I’m pleased to hear other informed viewpoints. And thanks, lance boyle, for keeping it real. It rings true to me that our collective addiction, greed, and plain old simple-mindedness keep us from gaining proper perspective on the level of damage we’re inflicting on the planet and ourselves.

By: Lance Boyle

Lance Boyle — Sat, 29 May 2004 08:02:47 +0000

“All the science on earth can’t compete with the matchless power of human stupidity.” ~~fireflye The automobile industry is the largest in the US. Throw oil~~and-gas in there and you have a match for Leviathan. Stupidity seems kind of a misnomer. It’s also the lead-off punch for the guilt-shift — get people to blame themselves for the blowback. Like with smoking. As though three generations of otherwise sensible people, all on their own decided to poison themselves with nicotine addiction, and then, in the space of about ten years, people just woke up to how stupid that was. Right. No coercion, no seduction, no subliminal brainwash. Just stupidity, and then not. Same with cars and gasoline. The US burns something on the order of 380+ million gallons a day. Anyone who thinks an economy like that is conducive to free and open discussion of its negative consequences is either a liar or a damned fool. Inhuman greed. Alien intelligence that counts the continued earthly presence and health of humanity as less important a variable than long-range petroleum reserves, or the daily price of bullion. Cynical self-interest operating at a degree of intensity that is indistinguishable from the Satanic. I don’t mean that as hyperbole, it’s indistinguishable. The greatest single cause of death for people under 30 in the US is travel by car. The larger picture is a grid of statistics that are as anti-life as the devil himself. – I like that, “skepticism or credulity”. “Grown-ups vs. babies”, pick the one you want to be. The automobile is a wheelchair most of us willingly surrender our mobility to and the rest of us are forced to, the roads are rivers of poison gas, our neighborhood landscapes are empty of children, our communal spaces are all indoors and mostly virtual. What difference does it make if the climate is shifting? It is, but what difference does it make as long as we keep living like this?