If there wasn't so much ridin' on it, it would be snickersome, the way the Traditional Media muddies the waters any time climate change comes up.
A good example this morning on NBC -- it started out as a fairly straightforward report on the sniping between Albert Gore and Sarah Palin over human-caused warming; she's skeptical while he, as he has droned on and on and on about, in endless and mind-numbing detail, is convinced right down to his marrow that We Is Killing The Earff (and yet he's never downsized his mansion or swapped his SUV for a bicycle) . Okayfine, good ol' he said/she said, with interview clips and file footage, quotes from Twitter and Facebook screencaps. Then it began to morph; we're told The Sarah "never expressed skepticism about climate change during the campaign," (not, mind you, AGW) and the story proceeds in that vein; suddenly, the "caused by humans" caveat had dropped out of the narrative, replaced by "ain't the skeptics ignernt."
I'm not sure if the reporter or producer even realized it; it seems likely that for them, GW = AGW, no questions asked. Funny, there's pretty good correlation between what the Sun is doing and how hot is gets on this ball of mud -- but what do I know?
Giant fusion reactor in the sky, a few nekkid primates, I know which side I'd bet on in a cage match. But I wouldn't be looking to the old media for coverage of the event.
Pffft, everyone knows that Geoge Bush is warming the earf with his weath control machine that Haliburton made.
ReplyDeleteThe Chimperor is to blame!
Shootin' Buddy
Well, 'anthropogenic' is a hard word that doesn't trip to mind readily. Too many syllables. Hard to remember. They could embarass themselves if they mispronounce it. Might as well drop it and just say Global Warming for all that stuff. Forget that A-word ever existed. Conflates the meaning a bit, but that's ok, right?
ReplyDeleteI wonder if it comes partly from them being non-technical people. Technical people tend to be very precise and concise in their use of language; non-technical people tend to be much sloppier and hilarity ensues.
ReplyDeleteWV: propen - POSIX function for reopening a pipe on a new handle?
What's weird is that if you look at the temperature data - the raw data, that is, straight from the thermometer, without any of these nebulous "adjustments" - there may not have been any warming for a hundred years.
ReplyDeleteI, too, started out as a "the planet is warming" sort of guy, based pretty much on inertia and "follow the crowd".
Yes, it sounds like a kooky conspiracy theory, but the numbers are the numbers.
Fascinating!
ReplyDelete