How’s the campaign coverage on global warming? Don’t ask!
Here’s a test.
Think back to the Sunday political talk shows and the major presidential debates of the past year. Now, think about the questions the candidates were asked by Tim Russert, Chris Wallace, Wolf Blitzer, George Stephanapoulos and Bob Schieffer.
How many interviews did the Fab Five conduct with the presidential candidates during 2007?
a) 550
b) 47
c) 120
How many questions did the Five ask the candidates?
a) 536
b) 1,069
c) 2,275
How may of those questions dealt with global warming?
a) 400
b) 100
c) 3
If you guessed “c” to all three questions, congratulations! You’ve got a good handle on the ludicrous state of television news. Make that “news”.
The always vigilant League of Conservation Voters has taken the trouble to count the questions from the debates and Sunday talk as we approach the end of 2007.
The first prize in the “Let’s Ask About the Most Important Issue of Our Time” contest goes to Chris Wallace of Fox (!), who asked the candidates two (2) climate questions. Running a close second was Wolf Blitzer with one.
What topics got more air time? There was the intrigue over Dennis Kucinich’s startling admission that he’d seen a UFO; questions about whether the candidates favored the Yankees or the Red Sox; and breaking news about Chuck Norris’s endorsement of Mike Huckabee.
If you’d like to urge the Five to ask the presidential candidates more about climate change, what they’d do about it, and when, the League has made it easy. Sign its petition at www.whataretheywaitingfor.com.
– Bill B.
December 24th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
The ‘problem’ here is not a question of whether or not the AGW hypothesis is a good one or not, or whether we are really seeing a warming trend, or any of that.
The way I see it is that the ’sky-is-falling’ propaganda campaign has turned a lot of people off.
Believers have screamed so hysterically and made so many over-the-top claims, that average people are now convinced it’s a bunch of hooey and aren’t really interested in hearing the candidates talk about it.
The best strategy for the Believers would be to calmly and rationally explain the science, not just scream the hypothesis from the rooftops over and over, and twist the facts of what we are observing.
Of course, if they’re only after more money and power, then sober science probably won’t help, and screaming in the faces of the lawmakers might be the only option.
I think you Believers have just about painted yourself into a corner, though.
December 24th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
By the way, Bill:
I had had the impression you were some sort of politician, but Joe says that is incorrect.
What is your profession?
December 24th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
By the bye, the link is not working as of this writing.
December 24th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Potential commenters:
“Ron” is trying to get you to “take the bait” and argue with him. I just tried to engage with him on serious issues related to causality (the thing he is challenging people to show him) on the recent Inhofe thread and he ignored all substantive issues that I raised with him. He has a “show me” attitude and we don’t know who the hell he is and therefore why we should “show him”. He wants you to show him billiard ball to billiard ball type causality for effects of GW. He seems intelligent but willfully ignores issues of proximate and distal causality, as well as the use of statistical likelihoods in the study of complex systems like the climate.
If he is sincere he has “issues” which he should take elsewhere; if he is not, he is having a good time wasting your time interacting with him and/or is on a mission from a libertarian political ideology to which he is trying to bend the science and the natural systems which the science tries to describe.
December 24th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
“Ron” is trying to get you to “take the bait” and argue with him. I just tried to engage with him on serious issues related to causality (the thing he is challenging people to show him) on the recent Inhofe thread and he ignored all substantive issues that I raised with him.
IOW, Ron is CP’s pet denialist troll.
Best,
D
December 24th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Link is fixed — sorry!
December 25th, 2007 at 1:59 am
Michael,
You’re a nut. There wasn’t much above to argue about; I was just giving my opinion about why the media coverage seems off.
But have a Merry Christmas everybody. I really mean that, too. Let’s quit fighting at least for a day or so and think about & enjoy the things that really are important. Turn off your computer and go hug your families.
December 25th, 2007 at 11:36 am
Good heavens, reading Ron’s reaction I felt like a member of a radical sect and not a fairly rational human being with a science background… for the record, Ron, though I have been having conversations with people about population pressure and climate change ever since that rather famous Club of Rome report was published in 1972, I don’t believe I have screamed hysterically even once.
I may have laughed hysterically, once or twice, especially these past years.
Even wept some. But not in public.
(I live close to the lowest point of the Netherlands so I guess I’m entitled, eh?)
Anyhow, to the topic.
As long as ownership of media in the USA remains so concentrated and intertwined with industry and interest groups, they will not cover this subject as they should. They are quite naturally loyal to the hand that feeds them. As are politicians of whatever country that allows industry & interest groups to reward them via contributions and the like. As long as the financial incentive exists for politicians and press to ignore climate change, they will. Vehemently.
http://tinyurl.com/25rt7n
Bringing this to the attention of the public may help mobilize a public response and perhaps (oh do I still dream?) legislation to regulate such influence.
It is always worth the try.
December 25th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Now we see Ron or “Ron” resorting to name-calling when his game is examined more closely.
And engaging in a little revisionist history: He lampoons other people’s positions…distorting them to provoke a response, stubbornly holding fast to a contradictory (and in most people’s minds here, distorted) position while ignoring the data presented, and engaging in lengthy exchanges…and then claiming that he is not arguing. Why would he be here posting these opinions so stubbornly without appearing to absorb anything from what others say, if he were not here to argue?
December 25th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Michael,
Since you seem to be doing a bit of blog surfing, like me, while your dinner digests, may I offer this article to read? The vast right-wing media haven’t been tripping over themselves yet to report this, so I thought I should bring it to you.
I don’t even have much of a comment, except to wonder if this tidbit could be a further reason to panic, a reason to change strategy, or just more proof that we have a long way to go in understanding the Earth.
(And an aside, to the extreme environmentalists and vegetarians that might read this blog: the venison and quail I just ate was delicious! Merry Christmas!)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/ releases/ 2007/ 12/ 071212103004.htm
Heat From Earth’s Magma Contributing To Melting Of Greenland Ice
ScienceDaily (Dec. 18, 2007) — Scientists have discovered what they think may be another reason why Greenland ’s ice is melting: a thin spot in Earth’s crust is enabling underground magma to heat the ice.
They have found at least one “hotspot” in the northeast corner of Greenland — just below a site where an ice stream was recently discovered.
The researchers don’t yet know how warm the hotspot is. But if it is warm enough to melt the ice above it even a little, it could be lubricating the base of the ice sheet and enabling the ice to slide more rapidly out to sea.
“The behavior of the great ice sheets is an important barometer of global climate change,” said Ralph von Frese, leader of the project and a professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University. “However, to effectively separate and quantify human impacts on climate change, we must understand the natural impacts, too.
“Crustal heat flow is still one of the unknowns — and it’s a fairly significant one, according to our preliminary results.”
Timothy Leftwich, von Frese’s former student and now a postdoctoral engineer at the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas, presented the study’s early results on Thursday, December 13, 2007, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
von Frese’s team combined gravity measurements of the area taken by a Naval Research Laboratory aircraft with airborne radar measurements taken by research partners at the University of Kansas. The combined map revealed changes in mass beneath the Earth’s crust, and the topography of the crust where it meets the ice sheet.
Below the crust is the mantle, the partially molten rocky layer that surrounds the Earth’s core. The crust varies in thickness, but is usually tens of miles thick. Even so, the mantle is so hot that temperatures just a few miles deep in the crust reach hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit, von Frese explained.
“Where the crust is thicker, things are cooler, and where it’s thinner, things are warmer. And under a big place like Greenland or Antarctica , natural variations in the crust will make some parts of the ice sheet warmer than others,” he said.
The ice thickness, the temperature at the base of the ice, and ground topography all contribute to the forming of an ice stream — a river of ice that flows within a larger ice sheet. In recent years, Greenland ice streams have been carrying ice out to sea faster, and ice cover on the island has been diminishing.
Once the ice reaches the sea, it melts, and global sea levels rise.
“The complete melting of these continental ice sheets would put much of Florida, as well as New Orleans, New York City and other important coastal population centers, under water,” von Frese said.
The ice sheet in northeast Greenland is especially worrisome to scientists. It had no known ice streams until 1991, when satellites spied one for the first time. Dubbed the Northeastern Greenland Ice Stream, it carries ice nearly 400 miles, from the deepest interior of the island out to the Greenland Sea.
“Ice streams have to have some reason for being there. And it’s pretty surprising to suddenly see one in the middle of an ice sheet,” von Frese said.
The newly discovered hotspot is just below the ice stream, and could have caused it to form, the researchers concluded. But what caused the hotspot to form?
“It could be that there’s a volcano down there,” he said. “But we think it’s probably just the way the heat is being distributed by the rock topography at the base of the ice.”
Collaborator Kees van der Veen began working on the project when he was a visiting associate professor of geological sciences and research scientist at Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State. He is now at the University of Kansas.
“Recent observations indicate that the Greenland Ice Sheet is much more active than we ever believed,” van der Veen said. “There have been rapid changes in outlet glaciers, for example. Such behavior is critically linked to conditions at the ice bed. Geothermal heat is an important factor, but until now, our models have not included spatial variations in heat, such as this hotspot.
“Our map is the first attempt at quantifying spatial variations in geo-heat under Greenland — and it explains why the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream is where it is,” van der Veen added.
To measure actual temperatures beneath the ice, scientists must drill boreholes down to the base of the ice sheet– a mile or more below the ice surface. The effort and expense make such measurements few and far between, especially in remote areas of northeast Greenland.
For now, the researchers are combining theories of how heat flows through the mantle and crust with the gravity and radar data, to understand how the hotspot is influencing the ice.
Once they finish searching the rest of Greenland for other hotspots, they hope to turn their attention to Antarctica.
December 25th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Ron: You are definitely reaching for it these days. Story got covered. It ain’t earth shattering news. Maybe there are hotspots and maybe they are in a few places near where melting is occurring, but are they very, very recent and if so, why? If not, what does it matter?
December 25th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
Even if the hot spots aren’t ‘very, very recent’ it might matter to some scientists. Might not. Maybe it should be ignored. I just thought it was interesting.
December 27th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
I just thought it was interesting.
In a FUD-purveying sort of way, no doubt.
Best,
D