Year 2, Month 1, Day 29: Talk To The Scientists, Mike.

Randall Parkinson and Scott Mandia take on columnist Mike Thomas’s volleys of idiocy in the Orlando Sentinel. It is excellent to see actual scientists doing this work; Mandia and Parkinson are both smart and dedicated people.

I am informed that this letter has been published. Yay, me.

As Parkinson and Mandia point out, our media’s relentless preoccupation with short-term phenomena has made it all but impossible for the general public to become well informed about the slow-motion disaster of climate change. When broadcasters and columnists offer an anomalous snowfall as “proof” that global warming isn’t happening, they are contributing to a climate of ignorance and irresponsibility. When that same media plays the game of false equivalency, where each genuinely worried climate scientist is “balanced” by at least two spokespeople from petroleum-funded conservative think tanks, they are acting recklessly and endangering all of us. What we need is education; a population that understands a few basic principles of science won’t be so easily misled. What we get, of course, is something different and much more damaging. As our warming world makes climate change’s effects ever harder to ignore, will our media begin trying to keep pace with reality?

Warren Senders