Exclusive: Besides nuclear war, arguably the greatest threat to human civilization is global warming, but the U.S. news media virtually ignored the issue in 2016, bowing to economic and political pressures, writes Jonathan Marshall.
By Jonathan Marshall
Emperor Nero may (or may not) have fiddled while Rome burned, but commercial U.S. TV networks definitely fiddled last year on climate coverage while the Earth grew dangerously hot.
Image of Planet Earth taken from Apollo 17
An annual climate report issued this month by the World Meteorological Organization confirms that average global temperatures and global sea levels continued their inexorable rise in 2016, setting new records. Global sea ice dropped to an “unprecedented” extent. Extreme weather conditions, probably aggravated by climate disruption, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, left millions hungry, and caused “severe economic damage.”
Yet in the midst of such frightening changes, and a national presidential campaign with enormous consequences for U.S. climate policy, the four major broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News Sunday — significantly decreased their coverage of climate issues on evening and Sunday news programs, according to a new analysis by Media Matters. Television programs like these are the major source of news for 57 percent of adult Americans.
The four networks devoted a mere 50 minutes on their evening and Sunday news programs to climate change in all of 2016. That was a two-thirds drop from the meager time they gave to perhaps the most important issue of our time in 2015. (These figures reflect deliberate coverage by the networks, not incidental mentions of climate by talk show guests.)
Remarkably, ABC managed to beat even Fox for the least climate coverage last year — only six minutes (down from 13 in 2015). Fox provided a grand seven minutes of coverage. CBS topped the group with 27 minutes, but that was still a sharp drop from the 45 minutes it devoted in 2015.
The networks can hardly claim there was nothing of substance to cover. Audiences love news about political controversy, weather, and disasters — and the issue of climate disruption provided all three. The 2016 election, for example, offered a stark and highly controversial choice between Donald Trump, who dismissed global warming as a “hoax” and promised to revive dirty coal as a fuel of choice in the United States, and Hillary Clinton, who supported major new investments in clean energy.
Yet the major TV network news programs “did not air a single segment informing viewers of what to expect on climate change and climate-related policies or issues under a Trump or Clinton administration,” according to Media Matters.
Similarly, their reporters did not ask even one question about climate change during all of last year’s presidential and vice presidential debates. Instead, they waited until after the election to inform viewers about how the country’s vote for Trump would affect the future of climate policy.
Media Matters notes that plenty of other climate-related stories also cried out for attention last year, including, “extreme weather events tied to climate change, like Hurricane Matthew and the record-breaking rainfall and flooding in Louisiana (which the American Red Cross described as ‘the worst natural disaster to strike the United States since Superstorm Sandy’); the signing of the Paris climate agreement and the U.N. climate summit in Morocco; the official announcement from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that 2015 was the hottest year on record by far; and investigations by state attorneys general into whether ExxonMobil committed fraud by misleading the public on climate change.”
Ignoring Links
Yet not once last year did NBC or Fox report on the link between climate disruption and extreme weather, such as the record rainfall in Louisiana or the devastating wildfires that consumed more than 100,000 acres across seven states in the Southeast. ABC gave the topic only one news segment.
Logos of five of the major broadcast networks in the U.S.
Fox News Sunday was the only show to address the climate context for the fight by Native American tribes to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline. Several networks offered slightly more coverage of the climate issues surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline, which will transport heavy tar sands oil from Canada, but ABC managed to ignore that topic as well. (The State Department previously reported that completion of Keystone could increase annual greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 27 billion metric tons per year, the equivalent of adding several million passenger vehicles to the roads.)
The Sunday shows did not invite any scientists to discuss climate issues last year. And aside from NBC Nightly News, no commercial network covered the link between climate change and public health, including the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like the Zika virus.
PBS NewsHour crushed the competition in terms of the frequency, length, and seriousness of its climate coverage. It was the only show to inform voters about the policy impacts of a Trump or Clinton presidency before the election. It ran 18 segments on climate science, compared to 11 on all the other evening news shows combined. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Trump administration proposes eliminating funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports the NewsHour.
The coverage choices of America’s most-watched networks have great ramifications, starting with the election of climate denier Donald Trump. His choice as EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, is a notorious climate denier, and is surrounding himself with former aides to Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, an even more notorious denier. His Energy Secretary, Rick Perry, notoriously favored closing that agency altogether. President Trump issued executive orders reviving the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. He eliminated references to global warming on the White House web site.
The Trump administration also proposes killing the EPA’s popular Energy Star program, which helps consumers save money by choosing more energy efficient appliances. His budget also would wipe out clean-tech research and development programs at the Department of Energy.
This week, President Trump plans to sign an executive order instructing the EPA to consider repealing the Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. His order reportedly will also encourage coal-mining leases on public lands, ease oil and gas drilling rules, and direct agencies to find ways to promote more energy production.
These actions not only fly in the face of science, they also run counter to his promises to create new jobs. A new Sierra Club analysis finds that across the nation, “clean energy jobs outnumber all fossil fuel jobs by over 2.5 to 1, and they exceed all jobs in coal and gas by 5 to 1.”
In the long run, nothing the Trump administration does about health insurance, tax reform, or military spending — short of getting us into nuclear war — will matter nearly as much as its determined efforts to prevent global action on climate disruption.
“We are moving into unchartered territory at a frightening speed,” warned Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization. “Every year we report a new record in greenhouse gas concentrations. Every year we say that time is running out. We have to act now to slash greenhouse gas emissions if we are to have a chance to keep the increase in temperatures to manageable levels.”
Jarraud issued that plea nearly a year and a half ago. Time is, indeed, running out.
Jonathan Marshall is author of “Global Warming’s Threat to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago,” “Dangerous Denial of Global Warming,” “To Fight Global Warming, Canada Ponders a Carbon Tax,” and “Global Warming Adds to Mideast Hot Zone.”
No left or right there, only the preversity of greed and money.
Gaia came to “realize,” during the Neolithic, that it had made a mistake in allowing humans to evolve to the point that they had (their brains, in particular), and then put our species on a course that would eventuate in our extinction. That course was detailed, brilliantly, by Eugene Linden in his 1979 Affluence and Discontent.
Given that our enemy is Gaia, it’s insane to think that we can win against Gaia. As Guy McPherson has said, pointedly: “Nature Bats Last” in this “game” that we have been playing!
Maybe Linden had never heard of Alvin Weinberg and the molten salt reactor Weinberg and his team ran at Oak Ridge in the 60’s. With Weinberg’s technology, we can put off losing to Gaia for a while. Now that most countries have learned about the technology we developed and nearly lost forever we should be well on our way by 2030 to changing how we energize the world. See my post above for more info.
pretty much rooting for Mother Nature at this point… our species has had 80 years of chances… we now deserve everything we get.
This is so disgraceful. Like the campaign that engineered the use of ignorance and stupidity, the minutes the different networks used is simply mind blowing. Today I heard that the administration vindictively ordered the shut down of over 50 EPA programs.
I’m 63 and won’t live to see the horrors all the programs to combat the “hoax” wrought. But I don’t wish for the end of the World based on capricious ignorance of my country the USA.
Not a doubt earth has undergone many change cycles preceding Homo sapiens’ arrival, fairly recently in earth’s history, but man is the species that has changed earth most. My rename for the species is Homo rapiens.
Capitalism is predicated on the assumption that growth can be limitless on a finite planet. It’s an obsolete system and now we’re seeing the consequences of our actions based on that faulty and selfish premise. We just can’t continue to overconsume, overpopulate, waste excessively, build cell phone towers and nuclear reactors everywhere, fill the seas and skies with chemicals, without Mother Earth striking back, regardless of what arrogant and ignorant industrialists or any other members of this illustrious society (a bit of sarcasm) want to claim will be just fine. With no sustainability ethic, we are sunk (probably from rising sea levels).
I have sometimes wondered about the “evil alien” hypothesis, it does seem incredible that such ignorant, dark forces are in command. I believe the CIA Operation Mockingbird program is one government conditioning program that is instrumental in controlling the media discussions, by using key media head personnel; I’m sure there are others. (There, I used a semicolon, which is used to link two independent clauses and can sometimes be a change from too many periods in punctuation. )
Thanks for an intelligent discussion, not so easy to find these days!
Homo Rapiens:
Consider the idea behind Genesis chapter 1, verse 28 to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth, and subdue it and have dominion over it. Sounds to me like the Creator’s mission statement for humanity was to be the Creator’s “boots on the ground” (presumably because our brethren Angels are a little too ethereal for the job). We are to be the caretakers, managers of this place and subdue the harshnesses and extremes of this place. Apparently the Mission Statement got garbled in the transmission and we thought it said make war and rob, rape and pillage.
* The real problem is the fact that temperatures are rising / rising faster than life can adapt. *
The Permian Extinction was the worst mass extinction in the history of the Earth.
It was caused by a rapid rise in temperature that
>>> wiped out 96% marine species & 76% of land species. <<> is 1C degree every 83 years or so. <<
*
That's 70 times
faster than
the Permian
Extinctions.
oil will remain the most important and strategic natural resource for the foreseeable future, no matter how many encyclicals the damn Jesuit writes or what Bernie Sanders or anyone else does. grow up.
I agree, and that’s another reason I’m so pessimistic. There is so very much money involved with Big Oil that they can buy as many politicians and as much of the media as they need to keep us heading straight for the waterfall’s edge.
There was a radically different kind of nuclear power developed in the 60’s that never made it to commercial production that has been “rediscovered” (it is hard to believe but the data of the project and itself was nearly lost) and it is rapidly changing the mindset of people who learn about it. These reactors use thorium instead of uranium, they use molten salt as a coolant instead of water, they do not produce long term nuclear waste, they can actually burn up long term nuclear waste, and the energy density of nuclear power is a million times that of fossil fuels. The bonus is that using thorium is an extremely poor way to make a nuclear weapon. And finally, by using molten salts as a coolant, accidents like TMI, Chenrobyl and Fukushima do not happen. All were caused by water cooling.
Since the rediscovery of the Oak Ridge experiment is becoming known world wide, countries are starting to reproduce what we did at Oak Ridge. China is well on the way to doing it.
We have enough thorium to last us thousands of years. We will not need fossil fuels as we can make synthetics out of CO2 in the air. I used to be very pessimistic until I learned that we had this kind of means of making extremely safe nuclear power. I think it is likely there will be many of these reactors by 2030 or 35 at the latest. And they can be made on an assembly line.
Here is the website of a company who has a contract to do a test project with Indonesia.
http://thorconpower.com/
Thanks for the link, very informative. I wonder why it isn’t being talked about in the MSM?
I’ve always thought that thorium reactors would be an excellent and relatively safe addition to meeting our growing energy needs in the face of shrinking fuel supplies. Never understood why it didn’t get more serious attention. Hope you are right about some to soon come on line. Once their efficacy is established, the old plutonium-spewing dinosaurs can be phased out, making the world a safer place.
Nobody has ever followed up on Thorium since the initial investigations. NOBODY! But the Chinese are tinkering with it now and might/maybe have an actual plant in operation in a few decades. Never mind that the process will still be subject to earthquakes, tsunamis, terrorists, attacks by foreign nations, murder-suicides by insiders, generic idiots, and tight-fisted utility owners. Oh, and you can make perfectly good atomic bombs out of the thorium power cycle.
Now if anybody successfully destroyed a multi-megawatt windmill, you’d have a pile of rubble on the ground you’d have to clear away before rebuilding. Ditto for a solar farm.
For your information there is enough Uranium to last thousands of years too – if anybody was dumb enough to do it after Fukushima.
If you’re into hot tips, here is one from 2003.
Are you old enough to remember how we’d soon be flying around in our own personal airplanes whose wings would fold away and would magically turn into cars as we finished our flight/drive to work? Hype has been going on forever, but the actual realities usually aren’t quite as simple.
“Turkey Fuel? Factory to Turn Guts Into Crude Oil”
Exciting stuff for headlines, but making it work was a different proposition.
The models could barely be more accurate:
https://ourchangingclimate.fil…
Observations versus the current range of model projections here:
http://www.climate-lab-book.ac…
Well Known GLOBAL Climate Models have successfully predicted:
· That the Earth would warm (noticably by 2015) & about how fast, and about how much.
· That the troposphere would warm & the stratosphere would cool.(no natural cycle could explain that ! )
· That nighttime temperatures would increase more than daytime temperatures. (no natural cycle could to that)
· That winter temperatures would warm faster than more than summer temperatures.
· Polar amplification (greater temperature increase as you move toward the poles).!)
(but no one ventured to say that MID WINTER, near the N. Pole, “with 24 Hrs. of no sun”,
that temps would be above FREEZING as they are THIS WINTER and AS THEY WERE 2015!!)
· That the Arctic would warm faster than the Antarctic.
· The magnitude (0.3 K) & duration (two years) of the cooling from the Mt. Pinatubo eruption.
· They made a retrodiction for Last Glacial Maximum sea surface temperatures which was inconsistent with the paleo evidence, and better paleo evidence showed the models were right.
· They predicted a trend significantly different & differently signed from UAH satellite temperatures, and then a bug was found in the satellite data.
· The amount of water vapor feedback due to ENSO.
· The response of southern ocean winds to the ozone hole.
· The expansion of the Hadley cells.
· The poleward movement of storm tracks.
· The rising of the tropopause and the effective radiating altitude.
· The clear sky super greenhouse effect from increased water vapor in the tropics.
· The near constancy of relative humidity on global average.
· That coastal upwelling of ocean water would increase.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
Model Performace on Various http://www.sciencemuseum.org.u…
https://www.ipcc.unibe.ch/publ…
https://web.archive.org/web/20
****
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002
****
Here’s a recent graph of global temperature from 1880-2016, do you spot a trend?
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2016/20160926_BetterGraph.pdf
Graph of Arctic sea ice over the last 1,450 years.
http://static.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Kinnard_2011_sea_ice_med.jpg
rakooi,
None of your links work. They all seem to be missing critical bits of the url’s causing Windows to state ” server DNS address could not be found.”
Global warming is a hoax in that it’s caused by mankind. The first part of the scientific process is the process of elimination. If global warming has been happening before mankind then that automatically disqualifies mankind as the cause. This is elementary science.
It is not a “hoax” or a “fraud.” That is ridiculous rhetoric. It is an hypothesis that may or may not turn out to be true. If true, it seems most probable that there will be both winners and losers around the globe, as some geographic regions, like Canada and Russia, have their growing seasons and regions expanded and others become too parched to sustain agriculture. I assure you that the thousands of scientists working in the field in a hundred or more countries over the course of many decades have not been trying to fool or hoodwink you. The main idea under examination is one constructed on first principles of physical chemistry nearly 150 years ago, not some pseudo-scientific kookery.
There is no conspiracy based on ulterior motives. There is no motive to cheat and no chance of getting away with such a plot. There is no consensus political or economic philosophy tying all these professional researchers together in a plot to subvert capitalism, democracy or whatever else you may think they are targeting in a mass effort. That thinking is irrational. If these scientists are proven wrong they will suffer dire damage to their reputations. The laws of nature are immutable, if an hypothesis is not congruent with them, that flawed hypothesis will be exposed sooner or later, especially one which draws a lot of attention such as this one.
And, believe me, these scientists are not getting rich in the meantime receiving government grants to carry out their work. Most of that money goes to buying equipment and supplies and to pay for their travel expenses to the site of their work, not into their pockets and bank accounts. I haven’t worked in climate research, but I was a career scientist and am familiar with the concepts around which this question centers.
The most preposterous criticism of it by the so-called “deniers” is to incessantly smear it by calling it a “hoax” or a “fraud.” I understand there will always be skeptics, as there lingered about the roll of DNA in genetics even fifty years after the description of its structure by Watson and Crick and the thorough elucidation of its function in the labs of thousands of molecular biologists around the globe. At least those dead-enders didn’t characterise molecular genetics to be a fraud and a hoax. I know very well why that loaded term is used: it’s to politicize what should be an unbiased objective investigation of a completely legitimate question. But calling it a hoax offers a better chance of getting that research killed, or getting potential remedies waylaid, by those who would have an economic interest in the outcome.
And your statement. “If global warming has been happening before mankind then that automatically disqualifies mankind as the cause” is totally flawed thinking. Climate scientists are more aware than anyone that there is massive evidence in the geologic record of past climate change not involving human activity. They were the ones who discovered it! That is why they study ice cores, tree rings, clam shells, isotopic distributions and a vast array of other evidence. And, they clearly make the point that human-caused (anthropogenic) warming is a phenomenon that will be superimposed upon whatever other climate change processes are “naturally” ongoing by Mother Earth. Thus climate change could either be exacerbated (if it is naturally warming) or mitigated (if it is naturally cooling) in the long term. You “critics” treat these highly educated, intelligent and motivated professionals as idiots who don’t know the first thing about the principles of logical thinking or the data base of their own field. Maybe you need to look in the mirror to find the real incompetents and hoaxers.
I might have more respect for your “side” of the issue if you just admitted that you think any remediation of the problem is simply too expensive and/or too monumental to be effective. Simply make the argument that fossil fuels are not yet replaceable or their replacements far too expensive or ineffective so that we can’t yet abandon them. I don’t think all the prognosticators of AGW espouse going back to living in caves and hunting and gathering rather than continuing to live in cities and mass produce food using mechanised agriculture. Just because we may never be able to completely eliminate the predicted effects of AGW, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what we reasonably can to mitigate them. Then we can rationally discuss what is meant by “reasonably.” Demonising the side you disagree with does not help humanity arrive at the appropriate policy on the matter. Other than the fact that you will be dead before it happens, how would you feel if the most dire scenarios came to pass and you were instrumental in blocking any mediation or mitigation of them?
Realist- Thank you for this very reasonable comment. A little logic goes a long way. I am no scientist, but I have wondered if perhaps the time has come to have some limited experiments in geo-engineering. It may be too late to just try to only stop adding green house gasses, and instead also work to remove existing excessive gases from the atmosphere, and possibly try other cooling methods. After all, we are inadvertently geo-engineering the atmosphere by adding these gases in the first place. I imagine any such project would be a huge undertaking when fully implemented, but perhaps some small scale modeling would be a first step.
Your thoughts?
Carbon dioxide can be scrubbed from a gaseous mix by trapping it chemically. I know that alkali, for one, avidly binds it. Pretty sure those who work in the field have suggested this approach and hope to store vast quantities of trapped CO2 underground. It is captured by water as well, but this mainly acidifies the oceans and is a danger to aquatic life, so we should want to stop that.
Some have suggested lowering the temperature by blocking some of the sunlight reaching the surface of Earth. Don’t remember what the effective chemicals were and what their secondary effects might be in the atmosphere. Sulfate comes to mind, but that would acidify water too–think acid rain and its detrimental effects. Particulates would block out some light, but what would be the health consquences? Painting a lot of the Earth’s surface white or silver would increase its albedo and reflect more sunlight back into space. That’s what an extensive snowcover accomplishes.
The simplest, safest and known effective approach would be to plant many more trees which would consume the excess carbon dioxide and store it as cellulose. More of any plants would do so, as long as the carbon is not quickly re-released through rapid decomposition, as would happen with many herbaceous plants that die and rot every yearly cycle. However, some herbaceous plant systems can store vast amounts of carbon over the very long term–think of peat bogs. Much of the peat is thousands of years old and used as a building material (and fuel, which recycles the carbon) by humans.
So, there are some possibilities in using the approach you suggest though, not being an expert in the field, I don’t know which have been extensively studied for implementation.
Methane may actually come to be a much greater problem than carbon dioxide as a green house gas if the vast amounts of methane hydrate on the ocean floor, kept stable only by the present low temperatures comes to be released into the atmosphere. Preventing that seems to be a better road to take than remediating it after it happens. Not sure how you can effectively and economically capture and sequester free methane. We should certainly better control its willy-nilly release into the atmosphere during fracking for oil and natural gas (which IS methane).
With global warming more water vapor will saturate the air, and this is a double-edged sword. The H2O is both a greenhouse gas in the vapor form and a block to sunlight when condensed in clouds, so the net outcome of more water in the atmosphere is difficult to predict. Actually, the water vapor question is what makes a lot of the computer models quite “iffy,” especially if it’s not taken into account, as it often is not. All the rain in hurricanes and superstorms and all the snow in blizzards is fueled by water vapor in the atmosphere, which we may not want to increase, whether its net effect is warming or cooling the air temps. Simple physical chemistry would predict that with increased greenhouse gases and a consequent increase in air temps, water vapor should also increase fueling increased rain and snow. Change one atmospheric component and a whole cascade of other changes will follow, so if we want climatic stability, we should want stability in the overall gaseous mix in our atmosphere. The simple monitoring of CO2 and methane levels tell us that is definitely not presently the case, so expect changes for good and/or bad, which then makes the issue 1) can we effectively manipulate and stabilise the world atmosphere, and 2) if yes, how much will that cost? What is the cost/benefit analysis, which becomes way beyond my pay grade to calculate.
What do I think will happen? Knowing humans, probably nothing unless and until damaging effects to the earth’s climate and environment do start to happen in a sustained and directional pattern. Then there will be a lot of hand wringing and finger pointing with different global factions trying to pin the blame on others. I’m sure that the West has already settled on Putin as the fall guy for whatever happens, but other parts of the world will blame us, blame China, blame third world rice farmers who till the earth using methane-belching water buffalo and whoever else is convenient. There will be lawsuits out the gazoo and they will remedy things as they always do [sarcasm]. Nobody wants to spend the money on prevention or remediation now, especially if there is an inkling of hope that they may not have to, or that it will not make a damned bit of difference. That would be bad business strategy, as formulated centuries ago in a world without constraints on resources or the problem of what to do with mountains of accumulated toxic waste products. So, we will do what humans have done since time immemorial: jump from one crisis to the next with our hair on fire but no workable solutions, believing that just spending money must surely set things right. Think of it as a sacrifice to the top god in the human pantheon: Mammon. But he will save only the 1%ers… and only for a while. All this underscores the beauty part of a nuclear war with Russia and/or China. All this becomes beside the point! No need to worry about a world that doesn’t exist any longer. The party goes on till the clock strikes 12 on the Late Great Planet Earth.
Thanks a lot for taking the time for such a detailed response. It was an education. Maybe planting a lot of fast growing trees would be a good first step. It sounds safe enough. If there is any hi-tech way to sequester methane, we should probably get ready to do that asap. I hear that as the poles melt, gigatons of methane will be released, creating a rapidly accelerating feed-back loop. At a certain point it will be unstoppable. Mother earth’s 24 hour bug (humanity) will die out, and hopefully some less vicious and more intelligent species will eventually take our place.
A good rational post. But the idea that CO2 increase has been bad for the earth has to be debated. See my article I posted above about CO2 greening the planet. If the hypothesis that increases in CO2 warm the earth is proven to be true, it does not necessarily follow that this increased warming will be bad for the earth in total. It depends on so many things that we do not know the answers to. But we certainly know already (at least according to NASA the increase in CO2 has been good for plants).
Back in the 1950’s there was a study done on IOWA corn fields when the CO2 levels were approximately 300-325 ppm. For nearly all day during the growing season, the corn was starved for CO2.
http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/29/6/500.full.pdf+html
I wonder what tests would show today.
I am far more concerned about the loss of animal life and the human population increasing to ten billion by 2050 than I am about the temperature rising 2 degrees C by 2100. The question I have is why isn’t overpopulation and loss of animal life the number one environmental issue of our time. If the CO2 hypothesis is true, overpopulation will make it far worse.
Sorry for the comment above. I see you have read your way through. However, I believe the climate models show increased desertification, increased ocean acidity, increased extreme weather events, and many other bad outcomes. I have been thinking that maybe a good first step would be to quit growing so much corn to feed cattle, and instead plant some fast growing trees on that huge amount of acreage to create a natural carbon sink. I’m no scientist, but maybe that’d be a good first step. I agree with you that overpopulation and the increasing rates of extinction are very real problems too, and that getting a handle on those would help with AGW.
Have you not bothered to read any of the evidence, and the figures from long before human impact,measured in a
Antarctic ice for example? Even in recent years the differences are obvious, and insurance companies have known it for years!!
Isn’t it a bit suspicious that MSM media keeps hyping Global Warming but doesn’t mention all the nuclear waster seeping into our water, or the monsanto poisoning our food supply, or cell phones giving us cancer, or that highly toxic chemical on printed receipts, or ???? The media has never actually cared about humans and our environment, so yes there is some agenda going on with MSM.
I see a positive side to all this despite the obvious disaster we are literally inviting into our livers. The positive is that any thinking person with even moderate intelligence can, theoretically, categorically dismiss the validity of anything the mainstream media presents to us with a clear conscience and display almost 100% distrust of the government. The only solution to the collective and personal problems we face is to resist in every way possible as we see fit the current power arrangements. We are ruled directly by oligarchs and we can only influence the oligarchs through massive resistance which would lead to the emergence of those among the oligarchs (a minority to be sure) who have some interest in posterity and the well-being of the planet and the human species. The dominant clique has no interest in any of that or at least I’ve seen no evidence of that at all. Instead I believe most of them are involved in various levels of hedonism, narcissism, and yes, de facto Satanism, i.e., the deliberate desire to transgress all boundaries and through that to achieve transcendence through the practice of evil. There is no other explanation for the current state of the world–I never wanted to believe it but careful research into reality has shown me that the main clique active in the world today resembles the world depicted by Stanley Kubrick’s movie *Eyes Wide Shut.*
You paint a pretty clear and convincing picture I must say. Sometimes this picture of oligarch madness makes me consider an enticing theory that we share the Planet with another group of intelligent, sentient, and malevolent (at least as far as our well-being is concerned) beings, who stand in comparison to us, as we do to cattle. They’ve been here longer than us, their numbers are much fewer, they live in hiding, and they constantly “eff” with us (both figuratively and literally) to “keep us down” and out of their hair. William Michael Mott wrote a fascinating book on this subject: “Underground Dwellers”(as opposed to outer-space aliens: another one of their deflections, supposedly). They’ve been called elves, dwarves, gods & goddesses, demons, etc… but a modern naturalist might just see another group of intelligent creatures who do not wish to be seen or known by us, and do not wish us well. It may be true that long ago, the Warrior Class was concerned only with protecting the Human Race from the depredations of these “Others”, but these “Others” have cleverly managed to turn us against one another, and towards self-destruction. They may interface with some of the most secretive parts of our Deep State (and so-called Royalty in earlier times), leading them to believe they’ll be rewarded handsomely for their betrayals of the Human Race to these predators (cat; toying with mouse). Just a theory…its a helluva good story though.
Yawn.
This article is beyond the sight of reason. AGW is no where near the problem it suggests.
I have been very concerned about the threat the AGW (human-caused catastrophic
global warming) “scientific consensus” poses for our nation’s socioeconomic health. As a response to this potential threat I have written a paper titled:
History and Ignorance of “Sky Is Falling” Theories with Special Emphasis on Anthropogenic Global Warming
Here is a link to the paper. If you read it and believe it has value, please pass the link on to others.
http://fregger.com/Busiiness/Sky%20is%20Falling.html
By coincidence, here is another article I just read from PCR.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/03/27/view-dont-often-hear/
If nuclear winter doesn’t kill us, our short-sightedness regarding climate change will.
I’m no expert on semicolons, but I’d say that this usage doesn’t look quite right. I think the subordinate clause needs to be able to stand alone, grammatically speaking, as its own sentence. Of course, there are arguments that the semicolon has no business in the English language to begin with. George Orwell wrote an essay to this effect at one time, if I recall.
@Dag I looked that up for you,
George Orwell deliberately avoided semicolons in his novel Coming Up for Air (London: V. Gollancz, 1939). As he explained to his editor (Roger Senhouse) at the time, “I had decided … that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one” (quoted in George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, in Vol. 4: In Front of Your Nose, Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 2000). Kurt Vonnegut had this advice for writers: “First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college” (A Man Without a Country, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).”
Regarding the media part -it is, unfortunately, normal for media fatigue/habituation to set in when a story continues to have a similar shape over a long period of time, especially if there are not dramatic new pictures to show. Story focus on “What should be done or is being done about this issue?” is more complex and controversial. The media, when it covers the story, tends to paint a false picture of the controversy as being a debate between those who have noted the factual data that the Earth is in a significant warming trend today and those who are skeptical of that altogether. A different way of framing the issue is a 3-way debate between Group 1 – those who claim that research shows that governments should take speedy action to reduce global CO2 emissions or humanity is going to have big problems soon, Group 2 – Who are worried about Group 1’s issue but don’t think research has confirmed that and want to focus on understanding the problem better, and Group 3 – Who think that Group 1 have been putting out a snow job to such an extent that they want to stop and reboot the CO2 debate entirely. This debate is really a lot different, because if CO2 emission reduction is not the key to helping humanity then a faith based focus on that approach would probably be harmful no matter what the serverity of the global warming problem itself. To the extent that talented people in media believe Group 1 is correct, they haven’t presented the arguments to the general public in convincing ways.
I’m personally interested in geothermal generation of electricity (with special batteries, step up transformers, etc.). Geothermal is applicable in a much larger percentage of global locations, seasons, and times of day than wind and solar – i.e. Winter nights in cold places can still support geothermal energy generation.
As Donald Trump takes his pen to destroy regulations put in place by Obama and others we are told that it is the MSM’s fault. Do you people realize what you sound like? Your love affair with Trump is beyond belief. Let us all say a prayer to the new deity “Donald” and hope that his next great act will be to get rid of the bad MSM.
My reply is to the article itself and not to Josh Stern.
Clarification noted. But I don’t see anyone above that is praising Trump’s acts on climate. The topic is about what should the media be reporting on climate. I’d say: update new evidence, new models, & new solutions while trying to do a better job of clearly presenting the scientific consense. Making “bad Trump” the focus of the debate isn’t all that helpful.
What love affair with Trump? I am so sick of Hillary lovers thinking that anyone who hates her must love Trump.
Just maybe we think they both suck. Hillary lies with every breath she takes. The measly efforts taken by the Obama administration would not have saved us anyway. Without radical change in government policy, we are doomed as a species. Which do you prefer, nuclear winter or global warming? Dead is dead, no do-overs.
The media has always feigned impartiality on this subject, like everything else. They report the factual temperature trends in the atmosphere and the oceans, and the melting of the sea ice and glaciers, but at the same time they give credence to the smears that have been made by advocates for the fossil fuel industries who condemn climate science as a fraud and climate scientists as hoaxers. Just as they mangle the facts over leaked emails to exonerate rash actions and poor judgement by Hillary Clinton and condemn Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump as sneaky saboteurs without actual evidence, they’ve done the same with emails stolen from scientists discussing legitimate concerns about optimal data processing and presentation. Oh, they don’t directly call the thoroughly reputable researchers cheaters and purveyors of some fantastic worldwide conspiracy to bring down capitalism and democracy, but they also don’t analyse and assess the accusations of those who do to be totally preposterous… just about as preposterous as “Russia stole our election.” No, they abandon their responsibility and claim “impartiality” as their defense. Maybe it’s really collusion, eh? In any event, the media finagles the issues through acts of both commission and omission, and I place a lot of blame on them for the fact that 90% of the posts in most on-line newspaper forums opine that climate scientists are universally scammers and hoaxers, trying to damage capitalism, trying to take down corporations, and posing a major threat to our economy and way of life, all in the service of their vainglorious egos and “free money” for government grants–as if such were dispensed like candy in return for cheap schlock, as if the government itself were in on the grand conspiracy to crash the economy and its organising principles, and as if taking such action would not, in the long run, destroy their careers and reputations rather than enhancing them. I can understand the ignorant masses missing that last point, but the supposedly educated and rational fourth estate? Apparently, nobody in the media any longer understands how science is practiced and why it has been so successful in elucidating nature and giving humans the power to control it and their own destinies? How low our culture has sunk during my lifetime.
It’s a thoroughly confused mess. There is a eugenicist faction hiding under cover of green movement environmentalism looking to reduce the World population (especially those of the “wrong color”), mainly by austerity and opposing development of all kinds, embracing de-industrialism, and refusing to develop third world nations (tearing them apart even, such as Libya, Syria, Iraq,etc…). Then there is solar-related warming due to how active the sun is, which many claim is the major culprit, which some say can’t do nothing about, others say we must vigorously adapt with major technology changes, from the exotic fields of alternative energy. Then there is the more solid reasons of major impacts on health that we need clean air and water, thus dictating a shift from carbon-based energy, which strengthens the green nukes argument, and on it goes the merry-go-round.
The hoax-claimers always miss the point that even though there are certainly known to be natural cycles that warm (or cool) the Earth (the geologic record gives ample evidence of that), anthropogenic warming will be superimposed upon them, making them worse or mitigating them as the case may be. So, it should not be assumed that human changes to the environment are irrelevant, benign or beyond remediation. In addition to our needs for clean water and air dictating restraint in the wanton exploitation of the environment for fossil fuels, a good reason to slow down and save those resources for a later day is that they are all finite, and they are used to manufacture many essential chemicals, medicines and other materials beyond just burning them to produce heat to drive our engines and generate electricity. So there is good reason to develop “green energy” technology beyond just climate change and environmental pollution. To be sure, many in the developed world (especially those at the top) would prefer not to share the Earth’s limited and dwindling resources with the presently undeveloped (“Third”) world and may, as you say, be employing everything from bogus philosophy to overt military aggression to block them from advancing and slicing the pie into more and smaller pieces.
My point is still that the media refuses to seriously referee the debate between the competing sides on this issue. Being “impartial” through silence is not the same as being objective and offering severe criticism when appropriate. Is the Keystone pipeline nothing more than a political football? Should the Dakota Access pipeline be built (or not) merely based upon which side has more clout or better facts and a more compelling argument? Shouldn’t who benefits and who pays the price (and how big a price) if things go a cropper be a deciding factor? At the risk of offending religious factions, the media generally does not argue to teach biblical creation alongside evolution in biology class. They come down on the side of empirical science, but they clearly don’t want to offend big oil on this matter. No, this they consider to be politics as much if not more than science, which is funny because they have chosen sides on so many other controversies, often involving mass slaughter on battlefields and the squandering of resources in such conflicts.
I should probably be careful in what I wish for, as the media certainly doesn’t always (often?) get it right when they do form a consensus and take a stand. It seems to me they would have us in a war with Russia over totally specious arguments, so why should I trust them to have an opinion on anything? I ask for too much, especially from pawns of the elite.
The cult of doom and death, cultivated through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a psychop launched by Western Intelligence communities in the post-WWII forties to make The West safe for fascism to thrive (there was purpose to running all of those rat lines to get NAZIs out of country) under cover of anti-communism, and a brain-washed version of “freedom” ,or perhaps “freedumb” is more appropriate. I read about it over at EIR, via their Searchbox. We’ve been masterfully prepared for Gotterdamerung. Bravo Maestro.
A significant component of modern capitalist propaganda is the demonization of fascism. Notice that every experiment in socialism from the Paris Commune to Qaddafi has been denounced as tyrannical enslavement under evil dictatorship – because this would be the justly earned fate of the one percenters in a system that corrects the underlying injustice of the unequal distribution of wealth. It is startling to read what the German and Italian fascist theoreticians actually wrote, and to discover what they accomplished. The fascist critiques of liberal democracy and its destructive cult of “individuality” are spot on. But in so doing, they committed the unforgivable heresy of demonstrating how capitalism and democracy are incompatible. By providing a viable alternative, they found themselves in the gun sights of the “democracies” for whom the application of unrestrained murderous violence to maintain their unjust status quo is the first, knee-jerk reaction.
“… while the Earth grew dangerously hot…”
Oh I didn’t realize so far that you are member of the criminal climate sect. Time to say goodbye.
… and buh-bye
You believe in a flat earth too, I suppose,and elves and fairies and devils.
I believe that NASA satellite data has shown the earth to be greening from CO2. See my post above. If we are going to rely on NASA to tell us the ice is melting, should we not rely on it when the tell us the earth is greening?
David-
Read through to “Realist’s” comments. I think you are a prime example of “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
These psychopaths actually view themselves as sacrificing heroes. It’s a good site to bookmark.
www*desmogblog.com/
I found enough information to locate this gem at the …and Then There’s Physics site. Every libertarian I’ve ever heard of believes himself to be the cream of humanity in terms of just about everything. In this case the famous person demands that he get special “stroking” and most definitely not be labeled as the blinkered idiot which he actually is in this case. Go to the site to locate him if you wish – I threw away all of my books by this gentleman quite a long time back because he is in insufferable jerk 99% of the time.
www*andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/
I use this one more for reference than for general visiting. If some famous Denier with a degree posts something the wattsupwiththat characters are waving around, I’m quit likely to find a respectable write-up here.
www*arctic-news.blogspot.com/
This site has been named in previous Warming essay discussions. The Arctic People are on the front lines,and the news from them is ugly – so much so I don’t make regular visits there either. A person can take only so much doom-and-gloom, especially when you know it’s not made-up stuff.
In his book Jungle Road to Tokyo Robert Eichelberger spoke of the same problem he had encountered in Buna.
There are going to be difficult days ahead of us on the Climate front. Probably impossible ones, but we can’t afford to crack either, for there just might be a way out of the hole we’ve dug and are still digging for ourselves.
Top 6 Climate Change Problems
https://www.youtube.com/embed/4Ew05sRDAcU
I’m like you Jonathan Marshall, while you question to where our media coverage is regarding climate destruction…I mean climate change, I wonder if our media can run a story not with the name Trump in it. Okay I get it President Trump bumps up the ratings, (oh there might be the problem…ratings?) but when will informing the general public get some air time? Oh yeah informing the public is not the MSM mission any longer, but entertainment, or rather infotainment is the guiding hand in all media forms.
We Americans of European decent should never watch the History Channel ever again chastising our 19th Century forefathers for what they did to the Native of the America’s fore now we of the 21st Century Exceptionalist have the Dakota Access shame to deny as our taxpayer funded war on the Indigenous of this land, for all but our need for crucial crude instead of life supporting water.
Somehow this makes sense when living a life of traveling for business and pleasure is the most important means of survival. Why on the weekends would would the American parents quit stuffing their kids into the van or crossover when there is important sports events, or cheer competition to help mold our offsprings athletic skills, and shape their minds. Yes we need our gasoline, and plastic water bottles….don’t get me wrong we could probably continue living the way we do, if we went renewables, or how about cars that get 109 miles to the gallon? Why must Nature always be the victim to progress? If we are to be exceptional then let’s set for ourselves higher goals to include good ecological results, and still maintain a great standard of living. Ask yourself starting out, are we even living right? Then go from there. Fredo tell them, ‘why we’re smart’!
Our media is still shrinking by the buying outs. I’m actually waiting to see the vast amount of our media be absorbed down into two major mega corporate owner ships….and yes, the board will set the narrative around their preferred outcomes of the agenda. This isn’t conspiracy theory, it’s happening as we speak of it. Today it is Trump and anything he tweets…so let’s hope that soon Prez Donald tweets something about climate change denial, and then let’s have that conversation….gotta go, the water is up to the threshold of our door and we are on the second floor condo of our Florida retirement escape!
In every Western country the national meteorological organisation is a hot bed of AGW, for a simple reason that there is more money for them in it. So when they produce another alarmist report, all leftists jump up and down and scream – the world is burning, the world is burning. Then they sent teams with cameras to film the natural melting of the ice etc etc. What a horrible group of people with circular arguments.
There is more money in AGW than in denialism. There is a whole industry and a religion. As I wrote before – AGW and Russian Hacking of US Elections were developed in the same lab, this is why there are such similarities in arguments and religious style argumentation: IT IS ALL SETTLED, of course, only the fools and the paid lobbyists deny it. Never stand between a man and his source of income.
KIza are you saying that man isn’t contributing to climate change?
I’m no scientist, and when it comes to the artic poles depleting I envision a earth once encased in ice and as it started melting at the outer most edge closest to the sun, well the receding took hold. Okay so far? Now, I’m not saying one way or the other man is responsible, but I’m asking how may man close down this process, natural or otherwise? Should we be concerned? Should we be building expensive beach front condos and hotels? I’m not being smart in any way but should we be doing anything, or will this change take care of itself?
Alright but the ecology. For instance urban sprawl, and what that does to the ecology. Why not tear down old city neighbors and grow trees? Stupid but this ain’t my gig. Although I am curious to how you feel on this subject.
Here is a link to an article which will throughly convince an open minded American to want to partner with the Russians…oil geologist that is, Russian ones. F William Engdahl wrote a article cc/to Rex Tillerson. Read it, if true this could change the whole oil dynamic on it’s head.
http://journal-neo.org/2017/01/29/rex-tillerson-and-the-myths-lies-and-oil-wars-to-come/
Too bad the data backs up the AGW claims. It would be nice if the deniers were right, but they’re wrong. Just look at the data.
And before someone jumps in to poke holes in one or another study, such as the “hockey stick” graph, it doesn’t disprove the totality of the argument, which is supported by common sense. Pumping the atmosphere full of pollution, and yes, only fools and paid lobbyists would claim otherwise.
The AGW deniers might think they are being clever and contrarian, but they are doing a huge disservice to humanity.
CO2 is definitely good for plants as this article from NASA clearly shows how the earth has greened since 1982. The idea that CO2 is completely bad for the earth is just not proving to be true. Would you want all this greening to be brown instead?
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
The world is now having record global harvests, partly due to the fertilization of plants by CO2. And as we approach ten billion people it might be much harder to feed them with less CO2.
And we don’t really know if global warming would be the disaster its proponents say. There will be obvious winners and losers with global warming. Plus a warm world is far better for life than a cold one.
Kiza, while I usually find your comments insightful, I think you’re way off on this one. For one, there is more money for meteorologists in the MSM than anywhere else, and most of them are forbidden to say the words “Global Warming”. As a kid, I played ice hockey every winter on a frozen creek near my home. No kid has been able to do that for about 25 years or so. Secondly, as a merchant seaman I’ve travelled a bit, and my shipmates have been to Antarctica and Greenland. None of them deny global warming. They witness it. The NW passage is now open to shipping. Satellite images (taken at the same time of year) show a receding permafrost. I could go on.
As usual, paid hacks for the Oil companies make much more money than any truth teller working for a government.
Take a read of the PCR articles on the subject.
It doesn’t mean that a warming world is bad. (See my post above about how CO2 is greening the earth). And if the world is warming it doesn’t necessarily mean man caused it or most of it. The world has been warming since the depth of the little ice age about 1680. There were some periods before 1900 when the world warmed faster than it has lately and CO2 isn’t a suspect for the cause of that warming.
It’s not a matter of the earth warming, it’s the rate at which it’s warming. Since the 1940s the earth has warned at a rate faster than at any time recorded. Additional CO2 maybe be good for plants but it is not good for man. Frantically low ice levels is not good for man. Either 90% of all climate scientists are all in collusion with one another pushing the same “junk science” or climate deniers are just wrong. You be the judge of that. There is so much evidence from National Geographic photographers, the Cousteuas, NOAA, fishermen and so on that it boggles my mind that people can deny its real.
Kiza, what a strange comment.
I can remember when every large and small town around here had a barbershop. Typically the place had one or two barbers and a semi-circle of chairs where a bunch of oldsters displayed their beer bellies and an appalling ignorance of everything except for the basketball game yesterday and the next one three days away. In my part of Indiana the old coots were always telling how they’d run the country if they had the chance. Needless to say, their solutions were extremely simple ones.
Well, our current president is one of those ignorant old farts. He has accumulated strong opinions from his hobnobbing with types just like himself, and these rich guys Have It All Figured Out. Government is evil, and must be “streamlined” so as to ease the way of the wealthy to become even richer. Damned Tree Huggers muck up everything!
Watching all this Denialism is painful, especially since it is directly leading to the end of everything worthwhile on Planet Earth. My only consolation is that while President Hillary would have talked a better talk, the net result would have been exactly the same. We’ve been screwed, blued, and tattooed since the Supreme Court took the Presidency away from Gore in 2000. It’s now sort of a reverse-countdown without any clear notion of how or even when the wheels start falling off.
www*siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/n0905-7000-underground-gas-bubbles-poised-to-explode-in-arctic/
Paraphrasing Churchill now: Now this is not the end. Perhaps it is not even the beginning of the end. But because there is a factor called “feedback”, as things get worse, the entire warming process gets worse faster and the unraveling accelerates. Positive Feedback.
What we expect from the corporate media. It’s all about money and power. The MSM news is totally distorted.
As Les Moonves of CBS explained, Trump may be bad for America, but he was great for CBS’s revenue.- http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/leslie-moonves-donald-trump-may-871464
Actually it is worse than we think. We are all going to wake up in a body bag when we find out that pollution from aerosol emissions, contrails and increased cloud cover from energized weather systems due to added heat and pollution is masking or hiding global warming.
Does anyone know that the total solar radiation reaching the surface of the Earth is 10% less than it was just sixty years ago?
No they do not know this.
Here is a documentary which may illuminate the situation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZrYJZaOO9k
Apparently, the Russians are publishing real news which was published by western news in 2005 but is not available anymore on western media.
The original documentary was a BBS Horizon presentation.
Gird your loins for truth folks. It is quite alarming.
But, according to our dear leader, this is all a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Who are you going to believe, me caught in bed with a lover, or your lying eyes? Thanks to Richard Pryor.