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Opinion Viewpoint

Hype Deluge

Like millions of Americans this winter, I sat in front of the TV, freezing and wrapped in a blanket. I kept waiting for the network news shows to utter the two most obvious words raised by the weather patterns of the past several months: climate change. We heard, repeatedly, about yet another “arctic blast,” the “inescapable winter,” and various efforts to describe the wayward ways of the “polar vortex” — “a cyclone that sits over the poles” with a counterclockwise rotation, one CBS meteorologist offered.

But we waited in vain for reporters to interview scientists about how these dramatic weather extremes are related to — and, in fact, evince — what has been unfortunately named “global warming,” a term suggesting that only heat waves could be evidence of climate change. CBS News did, however, interview the general manager of the Edinburgh Golf Course in Minnesota about how the course came through the winter.

Rather than using the drought in California, the oddly tropical weather at the Sochi Olympics, or the unrelentingly frigid temperatures throughout much of the United States as pegs for serious coverage of the costs of climate change, the Weather Channel, went into a naming frenzy, with each storm, however fearsome or tepid, getting a moniker like Kronos or Maximus or, my favorite, Seneca (the wise storm?), all proposed by Bozeman, Montana, high school kids. The channel started personifying storms in 2012, explaining that this was “the best possible ways to communicate severe weather information on all distribution platforms.” But their anthropomorphizing of storms as toga-clad gods trivializes the rise of extreme weather and contributes to what has come to be called “weather porn”: the rabid flogging of the disasterous aspects of storms at the expense of all else.

In February, CBS Morning News sought to explain why northern California was being run over by something named the “Pineapple Express.”

“So, what’s causing all this?” asked host Charlie Rose. “Well,” responded CBS contributor Michio Kaku, “the wacky weather could get even wackier.” Kaku, a physics professor, then explained that the polar vortex was like a “swirling bucket of cold air” that was spilling into the continental United States because the North Pole is melting and tied it to the broader problem of climate change. “I’m really trying to follow you,” said anchor Gayle King, struggling to connect the dots. She then asked, “What can be done about it?”

“Well,” Kaku responded, “it seems to be irreversible at a certain point, so we may have to get used to a new normal.”

How’s that for promoting utter resignation and inaction?

As for the Sunday talk shows, according to Media Matters, they devoted only 27 minutes, collectively, to climate change in 2013. In February, ABC’s This Week and NBC’s Meet the Press finally gave the topic real airtime. However, they did so in the most irresponsible way possible. NBC staged a “debate” between Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” and a climate-change denier, Tennessee Congressman Marsha Blackburn, who asserted, falsely, that “there is not agreement around the fact of exactly what is causing” climate change.

ABC pitted climatologist Heidi Cullen against Republican Governor Pat McCrory of North Carolina, who said in 2008 that “climate change is in God’s hands” (though he later backtracked). While both shows sought to refute the vacuous bromides of these GOP dunces, the fact that they gave them equal time, when 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is a fact and is human-influenced, suggests there is a real debate when there isn’t and legitimates doing nothing in response.

Of course, if you watch Fox News, the frigid weather “proves” that “global warming” is a myth. Indeed, Fox mentioned climate change nine times in one week in January in order to ridicule it. As its contributor, George Will, asserts, “the climate is always changing.” Well, yes, especially in the past two decades, which were the hottest in 400 years.

We’ve become resigned to event-driven, decontextualized news, but when the issue is as pressing, costly, and dangerous as climate change (floods, water shortages, severe hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts), we need fewer storms named after Greek gods, fewer numbskull climate change deniers, and more coverage about what’s actually happening, what we can and must do, and how we can do it.

Susan J. Douglas writes on a variety of topics for In These Times.

Categories
Opinion The BruceV Blog

2012: The Hottest Year on Record for the U.S.

Barring a near-impossible artic freeze dropping in for the rest of December, the year 2012 will officially be the hottest on record in the U.S.

It has also been ranked by the NOAA as the “most extreme,” on record. This means: “… the percentage area of the contiguous U.S. experiencing top-10 percent and bottom-10 percent extremes in temperature, precipitation, and drought.”

Climatologist Jeff Masters says: “…the U.S. heated up considerably in November, notching its 20th warmest November since 1895, said NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in their latest State of the Climate report. The warm November virtually assures that 2012 will be the warmest year on record in the U.S. The year-to-date period of January – November has been by far the warmest such period on record for the contiguous U.S. – a remarkable 1.0°F above the previous record. During the 11-month period, 18 states were record warm and an additional 24 states were top ten warm. The December 2011 – November 2012 period was the warmest such 12-month period on record for the contiguous U.S., and the eight warmest 12-month periods since record keeping began in 1895 have all ended during 2012.”

Ahh, but it’s just weather. Nothing to worry about, right? Apparently, there’s not much we can do about it, anyway.

Categories
News

Global Warming to Have Worst Impact on the South

From The Washington Post: “Climate change may be global in its sweep, but not all of the globe’s citizens will share equally in its woes. And nowhere is that truth more evident, or more worrisome, than in its projected effects on agriculture.

“Several recent analyses have concluded that the higher temperatures expected in coming years — along with salt seepage into groundwater as sea levels rise and anticipated increases in flooding and droughts — will disproportionately affect agriculture in the planet’s lower latitudes, where most of the world’s poor live …”

In the U.S., that means the South’s agriculture will be most affected. Read the whole story here.

Categories
News

Gore Wins Share of Nobel Peace Prize

Former Vice President Al Gore Jr. has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his service in informing the world about the perils of global warming. The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Friday that the Tennessee native will share the award with a United Nations panel that monitors climate change.

In its announcement, the committee characterized Gore, whose film documentary An Inconvenient Truth had previously won an Academy Award, as “the single individual who has done most” to alert the world to the reality of climate change caused by global warming and to the imminent threat it poses worldwide.

Gore indicated he would donate his half Nobel prize money — about $750,000 — to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit environmental group whose board he chairs. He issued this statement: “The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity, It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.”

The text of the Nobel committee’s announcement is as follows:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change

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Indications of changes in the earth’s future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds. Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.

Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming. Thousands of scientists and officials from over one hundred countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming. Whereas in the 1980s global warming seemed to be merely an interesting hypothesis, the 1990s produced firmer evidence in its support. In the last few years, the connections have become even clearer and the consequences still more apparent.

Al Gore has for a long time been one of the world’s leading environmentalist politicians. He became aware at an early stage of the climatic challenges the world is facing. His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change. He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.

Oslo, 12 October 2007