Environmental Law

Believe it or not- from The New York Times

By STEPHEN HOLZER

     From (if you can believe it) a column in today's New York Times:

...there?s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn?t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah?s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today?s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

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When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

***

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.

Guess which paper jibed with the theory ? and image of Katrina ? presented by Al Gore?s ?Inconvenient Truth??

Full post as published by Environmental Legal Blogs on January 01, 2008 (boomark / email).