Prophet of doom – converting?
At the Dappled Planet, we know the British newspapers are quite possibly the best in the world for doing their utmost to create hysteria based on nothing but the flmisiest of flimsy facts. And the one which seems to hype up flimspy facts and scream to the gullible public about the terrors out there to kill us all is no better exemplified than by The Telegraph. No claim is to small to be sensationalised and blown completely out of proportion by The Telegraph…. One member here spent 6 weeks in a place where the only English paper was unfortunately, The Telegraph, and they gave up reading it in disgust after 3 weeks because there was never a good thing to report and an awful lot of rubbish!
So it was with bemusement that we saw an article in The Telegraph published on the 28th December proclaiming that 2008 was actually the year of global cooling. In fact, if nothing else, he just re-iterated a bunch of ’stuff’ which scientists reported throughout the year – and if they were lucky, actually got some media coverage for it. But it was all ’stuff’ that said “Uh oh… The temperature of the world doesn’t rise every single year after all! It just did for the last 10, but now… inexplicably (or for those scientists now predicting it will mellow out for the next decade), it didn’t rise in 2008…?!”
Of course, in the scientific world, the conditions of any scientific observation/experiment very rarely do follow a straight line up – or down or horizontally or whatever the media thinks it should be to make it easier for their viewers/readers to understand. On the bright side though, it allowed the author, Christopher Booker, to point out some things which allowed our planet a respite from the heatwave which has apparently been inflicting us for the last 150 years.
Intrigued (and somewhat chastened after reading the book Bad Science by Ben Goldacre who although clearly after distortions in the media by professionals of medical bent, but who’s main point was that we should check out the facts for ourselves…) we looked up Christopher Booker. By following a link on The Telegraph website, we found other articles by him. Clearly a journalist who likes to stir things up! Quite often, he just may be a voice of reason… But when we delved further, past his career at The Telegraph and looked up his bio at Wikipedi, it turns out he’s made his fair share of contraversial sensational unsupportable claims in the past and to cap it all of, is not a scientist at all, never was and has no formal training in it. But he is a journalist.
Well, credentials aside, a lot of what Booker reported on was actually churned out by scientists during the year. It’s probably going a bit far to say one year of cooling temperatures meant man was not causing global warming – there are always fluctuations in our weather record. And the reality is far more complicated than that and in our opinion, Man is contributing to climate change in both cooling and warming capacities, but probably not significantly enough to have a big say either way, and even if we were, in the grand scheme of things, it would be ’short term’ as our fossil fuel reserves won’t be around much longer anyway. But we do need to get a bit more with it on adapting to climate change and managing the environment!
However, getting back to Booker’s story, what really bemused us here was that for whatever reason, The Telegraph must have felt they didn’t create enough of a stir on their abrupt reversal on searing heatwaves plagueing the planet for the rest of the century assuming rising sea levels didn’t engulf us first (Noah, where is your ark? We are going to need it!).
No. What really made us chuckle was The Telegraph reprinted the article 2 days later – this time claiming that their journalist Christopher Booker single handedly proved to the world that global warming didn’t exist – and then reprinted his article so that we’d all get it. Booker has saved us from rising sea levels and tropical temperatures!
The Telegraph must have decided they wanted to start a trend this time – and it was going to be global cooling. So for the short term, we would imagine we can expect The Telegraph to only churn out articles about glaciers advancing and Finalnd disappearing under glacial ice sheets and how everyone will be living in the dust bowls of Africa by the end of the century…??? No? Ok. I am sure there is a journalist on their staff who will happily take the first sign of spring in February to mean global warming is happening all over again as average daily temperatures exceed those of one month ago! Stay tuned…
