I live in the Pacific Northwest and sat through weather event in question.
The weather event was caused by a stalled high pressure system off the coast
of Oregon and Northern California which shunted the rains normally sent to
Oregon and Washington to Southern California. As a result of this movement,
we are at about 35% of our normal moisture. The rain delivery system is
still working however because we got 3.5 inches of rain last week and that
didn't make the news either.
We have been getting stalled fronts like this every once in a while and they
are as natural as the rain that they redirect. Quit trying to sound like
chicken little on every event.
Art Krenzel
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephan Pollard" <sp@no.address>
To: "Green Yes" <greenyes@no.address>
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2005 7:46 AM
Subject: Re: [greenyes] Analysis of US Media Blackout on Climate Disruption
While I do not wish at all to imply any lessened threat from global
climate change any learned student of paleoclimatology can illustrate that
earth's history is replete with instances of extreme weather events and
that it is statistically extremely difficult, if not impossible, to
isolate a statistically insignificant few and localized recent "extremes"
and draw a direct correlation to global climate change. Unfortunately
sh_t happens! There have always been torrential downpours - potential
problems are enhanced by an increasing population changing land use and
land cover! There have always been "catastrophic" hurricanes, there have
always been droughts, tornados, floods, etc. you just never knew about
them 'cause there wasn't any media coverage - either there simply wasn't
media, the event went entirely undetected, or some reporter decided not
enough personal property was damaged or loss of life occurred to warrant
significance.
While global change is likely very real it is way past time we moved
passed junk science.
Stephan
Peter Anderson wrote:
MotherJones.com / News / Feature
Snowed
Though global climate change is breaking out all around us, the U.S. news
media has remained silent.
Ross Gelbspan
May/June 2005 Issue WHEN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA was inundated by a foot of
rain, several feet of snow, and lethal mudslides earlier this year, the
news reports made no mention of climate change-even though virtually all
climate scientists agree that the first consequence of a warmer atmosphere
is a marked increase in extreme weather events. When four hurricanes of
extraordinary strength tore through Florida last fall, there was little
media attention paid to the fact that hurricanes are made more intense by
warming ocean surface waters. And when one storm dumped five feet of water
on southern Haiti in 48 hours last spring, no coverage mentioned that an
early manifestation of a warming atmosphere is a significant rise in
severe downpours.
Though global climate change is breaking out all around us, the U.S. news
media has remained silent. Not because climate change is a bad story-to
the contrary: Conflict is the lifeblood of journalism, and the climate
issue is riven with conflict. Global warming policy pits the United States
against most of the countries of the world. It's a source of tension
between the Bush administration and 29 states, nearly 100 cities, and
scores of activist groups working to reduce emissions. And it has
generated significant and acrimonious splits within the oil, auto, and
insurance industries. These stories are begging to be written.
And they are being written-everywhere else in the world. One academic
thesis completed in 2000 compared climate coverage in major U.S. and
British newspapers and found that the issue received about three times as
much play in the United Kingdom. Britain's Guardian, to pick an obviously
liberal example, accorded three times more coverage to the climate story
than the Washington Post, more than twice that of the New York Times, and
nearly five times that of the Los Angeles Times. In this country, the only
consistent reporting on this issue comes from the New York Times' Andrew
Revkin, whose excellent stories are generally consigned to the paper's
Science Times section, and the Weather Channel-which at the beginning of
2004 started including references to climate change in its projections,
and even hired an on-air climate expert.
Why the lack of major media attention to one of the biggest stories of
this century? The reasons have to do with the culture of newsrooms, the
misguided application of journalistic balance, the very human tendency to
deny the magnitude of so overwhelming a threat, and, last though not
least, a decade-long campaign of deception, disinformation, and, at times,
intimidation by the fossil fuel lobby to keep this issue off the public
radar screen.
The carbon lobby's tactics can sometimes be heavy-handed; one television
editor told me that his network had been threatened with a withdrawal of
oil and automotive advertising after it ran a report suggesting a
connection between a massive flood and climate change. But the most
effective campaigns have been more subtly coercive. In the early 1990s,
when climate scientists began to suspect that our burning of coal and oil
was changing the earth's climate, Western Fuels, then a $400 million coal
cooperative, declared in its annual report that it was enlisting several
scientists who were skeptical about climate change-Patrick Michaels,
Robert Balling, and S. Fred Singer-as spokesmen. The coal industry paid
these and a handful of other skeptics some $1 million over a three-year
period and sent them around the country to speak to the press and the
public. According to internal strategy papers I obtained at the time, the
purpose of the campaign was "to reposition global warming as theory (not
fact)," with an emphasis on targeting "older, less educated males," and
"younger, low-income women" in districts that received their electricity
from coal, and who preferably had a representative on the House Energy and
Commerce Committee.
The Western Fuels campaign was extraordinarily successful. In a Newsweek
poll conducted in 1991, before the spin began, 35 percent of respondents
said they "worry a great deal" about global warming. By 1997 that figure
had dropped by one-third, to 22 percent.
Then as now, a prime tactic of the fossil fuel lobby centered on a clever
manipulation of the ethic of journalistic balance. Any time reporters
wrote stories about global warming, industry-funded naysayers demanded
equal time in the name of balance. As a result, the press accorded the
same weight to the industry-funded skeptics as it did to mainstream
scientists, creating an enduring confusion in the public mind. To this
day, many people are unsure whether global warming is real.
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FOR FULL ARTICLE
http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/snowed.html
_________________________
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