[Vision2020] Institute for Public Accuracy: "Media Miss the Forest for the Burning Trees"

[Joe Campbell]

Thanks Ted. Two points.

First, once media decided to become a business and focus on profit
they -- like all businesses -- have become "conservative." Not
necessarily politically conservative but they don't want to upset
anyone and they need to maintain the myth that there are two sides to
ever issue, precisely because they don't want to distance themselves
from scores of viewers.

Second, I wonder what others will say about the analogy between
tobacco and global warming. If one applies the same arguments one
should be able to say the same thing about the connection between
smoking and lung disease as one says about the connection between
human behavior and global warming. Which is just to say that
anti-global warming arguments are general skeptical arguments that
apply to EVERYTHING.

So, Paul, why believe that smoking causes lung disease if you don't
believe that human carbon consumption has an impact on global warming?

Joe

On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Ted Moffett <starbliss at gmail.com> wrote:
> Institute for Public Accuracy
> 980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
> (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa at accuracy.org
> ___________________________________________________
>
>         Tuesday, July 3, 2012
>
>         Extreme Weather and Global Warming: "Media Miss the Forest for the
> Burning Trees"
>
> NEIL deMAUSE, neil at demause.net, http://twitter.com/#!/neildemause
>     Neil deMause is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has written extensively
> about climate change coverage for FAIR's magazine Extra! -- including the
> article "The Fires This Time: In coverage of extreme weather, media downplay
> climate change." http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4366
>
>     He said today: "Despite overwhelming evidence that climate change is
> causing dramatic changes in weather patterns -- from increasingly deadly
> heat waves and wildfires to hurricanes and tornadoes -- media coverage has
> bent over backwards to avoid making the connection between extreme weather
> events and the warming climate. Instead, reporters have largely hidden
> behind the truism that there's no way to say that any given event was caused
> by climate change. Yes, in the same way that it's hard to show that any
> given person wouldn't have gotten cancer without smoking cigarettes -- but
> that doesn't mean that journalists should avoid reporting that smoking
> kills."
>
> JOE ROMM, jromm at americanprogress.org, http://ClimateProgress.org
>     Romm is a senior fellow at American Progress, edits Climate Progress and
> holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. He recently wrote the piece "Hell And
> High Water Strikes, Media Miss the Forest for the Burning Trees."
> http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/27/507119/hell-and-high-water-strikes-media-miss-the-forest-for-the-burning-trees
>
>     Romm said today: "It is a basic conclusion of climate science that as
> the average temperature gets warmer, heat waves -- which are extremes on top
> of the average -- will get more intense. For the same reason, heat waves
> will last longer and cover a larger region. Recent research further links
> Arctic warming, and especially the loss of Arctic ice, to more extreme,
> prolonged weather events 'such as drought, flooding, cold spells and heat
> waves.'
>
>     "Since droughts are made more intense by higher temperatures, which dry
> out the soil, and by earlier snowmelt, more intense droughts have long been
> predicted to occur as the planet warms. Since wildfires are worsened by
> drought and heat waves and earlier snowmelt, longer wildfire seasons and
> more intense firestorms has been another basic prediction.
>
>     "We also know that as we warm the oceans, we end up with more water
> vapor in the atmosphere -- 4 percent more than was in the atmosphere just a
> few decades ago. That is why another basic prediction of climate science has
> been more intense deluges and floods.
>
>     "Scientists have already begun to document stronger heatwaves, worsening
> drought, longer widlfire seasons, and more intense downpours. Global warming
> has 'juiced' the climate, as if it were on steroids. The question is not
> whether you can blame a specific weather event on global warming. As Dr.
> Kevin Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National
> Center for Atmospheric Research told the New York Times, 'It’s not the right
> question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is
> it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.'"
>
> For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
> Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
> ---------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>
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