Another Whiff by the Network News Eugene Linden : endangered animals, rapid climate change, global deforestation, fragging

THE HAMMER OF THOR… AND LIZ AND BARBRA AND GEORGE AND KAMALA

Lately, I’ve returned to my roots in investigative journalism. I’m trying to get to the bottom to a recurrent episode of collective madness where every four years a marauding posse of celebrities, media figures, and supreme court justices go rampaging through the political landscape w...

Another Whiff by the Network News

Friday January 31, 2014

The NBC Evening News featured the California drought and the newly declared state of emergency as their second item in the program tonight (Jan. 31, 2014). They covered all the bases – an orange grower worrying that his trees would die, the expert opining that this was the worst drought in anyone’s lifetime, one of the driest January’s ever recorded, etc – all except one that is. They never mentioned that the drought might well be related to climate change.

Well over a decade ago, Richard Seager of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory first published a study predicting that the shifting of the precipitation zones further north in a warming world would lead to extreme and persistent drought in the Mediterranean (dry summer, subtropical climate) regions of the world, including the American southwest. I was in contact with Dr. Seager a couple of years ago after an earlier report on the southwest drought on the CBS evening news because that report also failed to mentioned the global warming connection. He said that he had spoken at length about the role of global warming during the interview, but none of those comments made it into the broadcast.

If, as Richard Seager has argued in the world’s leading scientific journals, climate change will likely lead to intensifying drought in these regions over the next 100 years, don’t you think viewers of the network news broadcasts might like to hear that perspective? Or, are we to get a drumbeat of news items over the next decades, itemizing the toll of the droughts, but never exploring why they might be happening?

Short Take

The Laws of Physics for Babies

[I published this years ago, but with friends having babies, I thought it might be a useful resource]

THE LAWS OF PHYSICS FOR BABIES

Close observation of babies has led me to believe that the infant universe is characterized by its own physics, quite distinct from particle physics or the Newtonian laws of motion. I welcome and will periodically post suggestions about additional laws of the baby universe.

LAWS OF MOTION:

1) The Inflationary Universe: Obects tend to recede when you reach for them.

2) The Boomerang Effect: Once successfully grabbed, however, objects usually reappear after being thrown, with the special exception of objects made of glass or metal.

3) The Relativity of Gravity:

a) Gravity and Acoustics. Gravity can be temporarily reversed by generating noises, but only in the presence of other people. The speed of this reversal is directly proportional to the decibel level of the sounds generated.

b) Gravity and Context. Gravity spontaneously and unexpectedly reverses itself when approaching stairs, antiques, and the Thanksgiving dinner table.

FLUID DYNAMICS: 1) Animal Spirits: Fluids have a vital forces that causes them to splash and spill unless contained in bottles and sippy cups.

MATERIALS PHYSICS:

1) Conservation of Shape: Once broken or bent, objects tend to reappear in their original configutation.

2) Transformation: When reached for, shiny metal objects tend to recede and then become transformed into plastic or rubber.

GRAND UNIFYING CONSTANT: The Attractive Pull of Mommy: the one universal force.