This photo taken on November 6 and released on November 12 by the Australian Antarctic Division shows a giant iceberg. The iceberg, 700 metres (2,300 feet) long with an estimated depth of 350 metres, has been spotted floating off Australia and could be headed for New Zealand, scientists said on Thursday.
‘Hackergate’ has led to all sorts of over-reaction from politicians, pundits and media, but mostly from the media. We expect the right-wing to over-react and misinterpret events for political reasons, because that is what they do. It’s their purpose. But why is the media framing the hacked emails crime as though the illegal thing was the scientists emailing each other, and what they said? The crime was the stealing of the emails and the surrounding events that were like Watergate office break-ins, and stolen computers and papers. This all happened, but this crime and what motiviated it is not what American media is focused on. Here is a good timeline from Alternet and from reading it you can see how this has seemingly escalated according to a pattern, one which is well-recognized at this point.
Meanwhile, now even Antarctica is breaking up due to warmer water. That massive ice chunk in the photo is from the “too big to fail” ice sheet in Antarctica, which is breaking up on at least one edge. Here are the points about media coverage that matter regarding the hacked emails.
THE SCIENCE HASN’T CHANGED: While global warming deniers are trying to use the hacked emails to prove that the science of global warming has been debunked, the truth is that the scientific consensus remains as strong as ever. More than 1,700 British scientists have released a statement affirming their “utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming.” Meanwhile, a statement from the U.K.’s National Weather Service, the National Environment Research Council, and the Royal Society noted that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment, “the most comprehensive and respected analysis of climate change to date, states clearly that without substantial global reductions of greenhouse gas emissions we can likely expect a world of increasing droughts, floods and species loss, of rising seas and displaced human populations.” “The content of the stolen e-mails has no impact whatsoever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming,” wrote 25 leading U.S. scientists in a letter to Congress on Dec. 4. After a careful review of the leaked e-mails, the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that while “they do raise some valid concerns about scientific integrity, they do not indicate that climate data and research have been compromised.” Just this week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released new data that it had compiled that concluded that 2009 will likely be the fifth-warmest year ever recorded. WMO’s data “does not show a slowdown or reversal of the global warming trend.” Michel Jarraud, the secretary-general of the WMO, said that if nothing is done to reverse climate change, “cold periods will become less frequent, and heat waves and typhoons will become more frequent and more intense.” As Time concludes, “The truth is that e-mails, while unseemly, do little to change the overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of man-made climate change.”
THE SWIFTBOATING OF SCIENCE BEGINS: The coordinated attack began last month when more than a thousand stolen internal e-mails from the CRU were dumped on a Russian web server. Hackers then used a computer in Saudi Arabia to post the e-mails on the climate skeptic website Air Vent. Skeptic blog “Watts Up With That” then picked up the story, and it wasn’t long before the National Review and the rest of the right-wing blogosphere leaped on the hacked e-mails. Within a few days of the leak, Sen. David Vitter’s (R-LA) staff began distributing a letter claiming that the stolen e-mails revealed that global warming “could well be the greatest act of scientific fraud in history.” Soon after, right wingers of all stripes took up the cause of using the e-mails to debunk climate science, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, oil empire tycoon David Koch, and radical Fox News host Glenn Beck. Despite all this hysteria, the truth is that the content of the e-mails proved no such thing. Right wingers point to exchanges between climate scientists disparaging global warming deniers, which by itself does nothing to disprove the case of a warming planet. The most prominent e-mail deniers are touting is one from Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann sent to CRU chief Phil Jones, where Mann wrote, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” While conspiracy theorists were quick to declare that this was evidence of Mann and Jones conspiring to hide data skeptical of global warming, as Time explains, Jones’s “‘trick’…simply referred to the replacing of proxy temperature data from tree rings in recent years with more accurate data from air temperatures. It’s an analytical technique that has been openly discussed in scientific journals for over a decade — hardly the stuff of conspiracy.” Even conservative writer Megan McArdle has admitted, “I have so far seen no evidence of the kind of grand conspiracy that some critics have charged.”
THE MEDIA BOOSTS THE CONSPIRACY: Despite the fact that the e-mails in no way disprove the science of climate change, the mainstream media almost instantly took up the right wing’s spin and used it to undermine the case for the existence climate change. NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams quickly adopted the conservative Climategate smear, asking, “Have the books been cooked on climate change?” Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal accused climate scientists of being Stalinists. A variety of Fox News hosts and guests promoted the e-mails over and over again as refuting the science of climate change. One of the worst media reports on the non-scandal appeared on CBS News. The network reported that the “e-mails seem to show that some of the top experts decided to exclude or manipulate some research that didn’t help prove global warming exists,” and said that the e-mails could cause the Copenhagen conference to “only produce the framework for an agreement that then will be passed on to next year.” The mainstream media’s willingness to grant legitimacy to the conspiracy theories has had unfortunate consequences. Two of the scientists whose e-mails were leaked have received death threats, prompting the FBI to launch an investigation. The Saudi negotiator in Copenhagen told the press that his government’s “confidence” in the science of climate change “has been shaken” by the hacked e-mails.”
Read the rest of this AlterNet story here.
When I was working in food safety I would read newspaper articles about things within my range of working knowledge and inevitably the reporters would make mistakes in facts, errors in emphasis, quote people with an axe to grind. I began to assume that if they made those mistakes in things I knew about they were probably also making mistakes in reporting things I didn’t know about. Case in point, the reporting over the hacked e-mails. Reporters who had little exposure to the history of the science behind global warming were writing about it with predictable results. This too shall pass.
The time comes when it’s time to face the harsh and bitter reality. Rather than face the fact that global warming is a very real and potentially lethal condition that could decimate life on this planet, they’re making up things and not looking at the problem. Instead they are trying to malign the science of global warming and someone put those hackers up to the hacking in the first place to create a red herring. That should not have succeeded. If these people had been on the Titanic after it struck the ice berg, I can imagine them telling people that it’s ludicrous to get into any life boat. ‘It’s warm up here!’ ‘You don’t need to have a knee-jerk reaction to this!’ ‘This boat is unsinkable, so bottoms up!’ Meanwhile, some of their less-influential lackeys would be gathering ice from the berg and breaking it up into small pieces to sell to people on deck. ‘Get your ice cold, fresh water! Have a nice, cold drink with this freshest of fresh water!’ Naysayers would denounce any idea to transfer from the Titanic to the lifeboat because it’s cold out there and up here we have music, carpeting and even a spa if you want to work out later. As the ship begins to list, some people might look around nervously. The con-barkers would continue ‘It’s okay! All you have to do is have faith. This is the sea. Of COURSE there will be an occasional rocking of the boat!’ Meanwhile people will ignore that there is climate change that will change the world for the worst. Even now, kkkonservative$$ maintain that Jesus is coming to make a new world and it doesn’t matter what happens. Some less crazy ones still play the part of the Titanic barker. In either case, you’re still facing a huge problem. Whether homo sapiens lives or dies is of no concern to nature, which is indifferent. If we die off, the planet will still be blessed with roaches, ticks and probably deer. We are the dominant, but not necessarily superior, species. We have an obligation to not make life more challenging even if we can create pollution on an astronomical scale. The day will come when such hollow and superficial arguments about how global warming will be good because we will be able to grow more food will not stand long outside the rushbo circles. When places that depend on ice bringing water to future crops in the spring don’t have the water they need, there will be war. It won’t be a war of choice or discretion like in Iraq. It will be farmers and agrarian societies (China and Russia, e.g.) fighting for their very lives. If those who wish to deny climate change continue in this way, the day will come when their water is out and life as they know it will end. Mass starvation and nature culling millions or more could be their lot. At that point, the spokesliars on TV will not mean much, but at least they will die with a lot of money in their account which they can’t eat.
@Bugga: It’s true that “nature” won’t miss us at all. I have no doubt that the environment is in the process of killing us off but unfortunately it’s taking lots of animals with it. In fact, they are going first.
I feel really sorry for the kids and babies that are alive right now, their future is going to be very tough. And most of their parents are completely oblivious, not even through their own fault.