Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Time Magazine's terrible biasness Part 1


Time’s most recent magazine is centered around global warming and 51 things you each of us can do to make a difference and help stem the obviously inevitable foreseeable global catastrophe. I took great pleasure in analyzing each of these 51 things and deciphering how much of a difference it will make. Interestingly, they have their own scale on these issues too. The have an impact, time horizon and feel good factor scale for each of the 51 steps. What is interesting is that they loudly applaud steps that make no impact whatsoever but feel good. More useless gestures. But nevertheless, before I delve into the steps, I want to analyse their prologue.


If droughts and wildfires, floods and crop failures, collapsing climate-sensitive species and the images of drowning polar bears didn't quiet most of the remaining global-warming doubters, the hurricane-driven destruction of New Orleans did.


Unfortunately no, I like many other people have not lost our case, no matter how biased and one sided this statement is. It makes it sound as though the critics have all finally lost their case after New Orleans, when there is ample evidence that global warming has no effect on hurricanes.

Dismissing a scientist's temperature chart is one thing. Dismissing the death of a major American city is something else entirely.

It seems now it's a moral issue, not a scientific one.

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report on the state of planetary warming in February that was surprising only in its utter lack of hedging.


Damn, surely we are all going to fry and burn more than what the IPCC say?

Some lingering critics still found wiggle room in the U.N. panel's findings. "I think there is a healthy debate ongoing, even though the scientists who are in favor of doing something on greenhouse gases are in the majority," says Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin.

So it isn't a consensus then? I thought everyone was converted after Hurricane Katrina?

But when your last good position is to debate the difference between certain and extra certain, you're playing a losing hand.

How can one be more certain than certain? Perhaps the sentence should have said, debate the difference between most probable and certain, which you are obviously not always playing a losing hand.

"The science," says Christine Todd Whitman, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (epa), "now is getting to the point where it's pretty hard to deny."

Ahh so it's still possible then?

Indeed it is.

Of course, I'm converted now.

Planting trees is great, but in some parts of the world, the light-absorbing color of the leaves causes them to retain heat and paradoxically increases warming.

Damn. Can we seriously cut these forests down. Evil forests.

Beneath the grass-roots action, larger tectonic plates are shifting.

Is this a subtle stab at blaiming earth quakes and tsunami's on global warming? I would hope not.

But alas, I'm looking forward to analysing each of the 51 steps so that we all won't fry. This is going to be fun indeed!

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