1984
Popular media is really unbelievable. (In several senses of the word.)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070201/ap_on_sc/france_climate_change
This article was featured on Yahoo! News today. It's 2007. In 1997, the world held a meeting in which pretty much every country of any size (except for the U.S. and Australia) put their names on a document, The Kyoto Protocol, acknowledging the issue of climate change and promising to address it. Global warming isn't news. A thorough representative sampling shows that 100% of peer-reviewed articles in scientific publications over the last decade or so raise no questions about the reality of global warming and its correlation to human activity. Still, over 50% of popular media articles make it sound like the issue is still a "theory" surrounded by significant doubt.
Napoleon is quoted as saying, "It's not necessary to censor the news, it's sufficient to delay it until it no longer matters." (Or until it matters very much but is too late.) With issues that refuse to go away, governments resort to coming out with confident, "honest" disclosures spun to appear as though whatever information they are presenting is a late-breaking revelation. The general public cooperates with this arrangement by having the memory of a goldfish. Today's global warming headline was news a decade ago, if not more. Bush's pronoucement on our "oil addiction" during last year's State of the Union address is actually a 30-year-old story that was all too happily forgotten. Evidence for climate change and petroleum scarcity was presented to the Carter administration and he tried to start doing something about it, then was laughed out of office in favor of someone who would tell the American people exactly what they wanted to hear.
Last week, I finally got around to seeing "An Inconvenient Truth". I am not as optimistic as Gore about our ability to right the problem through higher fuel economy vehicles and renewable energy, but otherwise I thought the film was excellent. Gore is very well-spoken and presents a compelling scientific case as well as making valid ethical and emotional appeals without getting overly sappy. He also manages some much-needed comic relief.
If you're not going to watching the film, please at least read this.
http://www.xanga.com/ingrado/499603238/global-warming-101.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070201/ap_on_sc/france_climate_change
This article was featured on Yahoo! News today. It's 2007. In 1997, the world held a meeting in which pretty much every country of any size (except for the U.S. and Australia) put their names on a document, The Kyoto Protocol, acknowledging the issue of climate change and promising to address it. Global warming isn't news. A thorough representative sampling shows that 100% of peer-reviewed articles in scientific publications over the last decade or so raise no questions about the reality of global warming and its correlation to human activity. Still, over 50% of popular media articles make it sound like the issue is still a "theory" surrounded by significant doubt.
Napoleon is quoted as saying, "It's not necessary to censor the news, it's sufficient to delay it until it no longer matters." (Or until it matters very much but is too late.) With issues that refuse to go away, governments resort to coming out with confident, "honest" disclosures spun to appear as though whatever information they are presenting is a late-breaking revelation. The general public cooperates with this arrangement by having the memory of a goldfish. Today's global warming headline was news a decade ago, if not more. Bush's pronoucement on our "oil addiction" during last year's State of the Union address is actually a 30-year-old story that was all too happily forgotten. Evidence for climate change and petroleum scarcity was presented to the Carter administration and he tried to start doing something about it, then was laughed out of office in favor of someone who would tell the American people exactly what they wanted to hear.
Last week, I finally got around to seeing "An Inconvenient Truth". I am not as optimistic as Gore about our ability to right the problem through higher fuel economy vehicles and renewable energy, but otherwise I thought the film was excellent. Gore is very well-spoken and presents a compelling scientific case as well as making valid ethical and emotional appeals without getting overly sappy. He also manages some much-needed comic relief.
If you're not going to watching the film, please at least read this.
http://www.xanga.com/ingrado/499603238/global-warming-101.html
posted by Ingrid at 10:34 AM
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