environment: false equivalence heatwave media irresponsibility
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 29: There Was A Movie By That Name, IIRC
LA had a really hot day, as the LA Times reported.
I’m really busy; this letter is pretty much a bricolage of earlier materials. What the hell.
“The record highs follow a summer of record lows.” That sentence sums up the Times’ coverage of the recent heat wave in the city. Left out of the article (and of most coverage of extreme weather in the nation’s press) is any mention of global climate change. It is impossible to specifically attribute any single weather event to global warming; science doesn’t work that way. But it is irrefutable that since the mid-1980’s, climatologists have predicted exactly these sorts of phenomena as consequences of the greenhouse effect: anomalous highs, lows, and general weirdness. As climate change is felt more and more forcefully everywhere around the world, our media continues to pretend that the evidence for human causes of global heating hasn’t been established. If the evidence for Iraqi WMD’s was as strong as that for anthropogenic global warming, we’d have been able to buy nuclear bombs on the streets of Baghdad.
Warren Senders