Yes indeed cc, back to the topic of fraudulent man made global warming.
Here is a piece which was published in NYT yesterday addressing the psychological compulsion to believe in the current "man is causing warming alarmism".
When judging risks, we often go wrong by using whats called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because weve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a
stroke because we dont have so many vivid images readily available.
Slow warming doesnt make for memorable images on television or in peoples minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to
hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an availability cascade, a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the
University of Southern California, and
Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the
University of Chicago.
The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and The China Syndrome, minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.
Many people concerned about climate change, Dr. Sunstein says, want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in peoples minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I dont doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but theres a danger that any consensus on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.
Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, theres not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting or why the globes other pole isnt melting, too.
Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but theyre also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by
NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.
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 Gores Inconvenient Truth?
It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.
full article:
The New York Times > Log In
