A news report in Thursday’s Edmonton Journal, titled “Global warming ‘undeniable,’ world report says” is accompanied by photo of a boy – he looks maybe six years old – paddling a primitive canoe with two siblings aboard, one of whom appears to be little more than a toddler. The caption to the photo says:
Kuna children row toward their island in Kuna Yala last month. Rising seas from global warming are forcing thousands of indigenous Panamanians to leave their ancestral homes and climate change is being blamed, at least in part.
According to the NSIDC, the sea level has risen 3 mm – about a tenth of an inch – per year since 1993. The IPCC – hardly a bastion of understatement when it comes to touting AGW damage – estimates the average rate of sea level rise to be 1.8 mm annually – or about one-fourteenth of an inch per year.
Yes, run, indigenous peoples of the world, flee your ancestral homes and run for higher ground.
You’d think the Edmonton Journal would be a little more careful with this story, since Edmonton didn’t break 30 degrees all of July. “Global Everywhere But Here Warming” just doesn’t have the same ring.
FACLC, Edmonton is warming faster than everywhere else, don’t ya know?
The edmonton journal is arguably the most left-wing paper in the country behind the Star and the winnipeg FreeP. Thus silliness that cannot stand-up to even the most cursory objective analysis gets printed.
What I would like to see is the response the author would have to what is being pointed out in the post above. Does he or she have any kind of counter-argument/excuse for such biased and alarmist ‘reportage’?
Gord, I truly believe that the facts don’t matter to people like Carmen Chai, who wrote the piece. (She’s a Ryerson grad, I believe; she used to write for the Ryersonian.)
I’d be surprised if Chai was completely unaware of the actual rate of sea-level rise. Facts just get in the way of advocacy journalism, so they’re elided. A lot of what I see in the Redmonton Journal amounts to a bald-assed attempt to alarm the Readers who *aren’t* aware of the facts.
Gord — heh, on a trip to Edmonton a couple years back, I glanced through a copy of the Journal. Quite literally, within the first minute, I was more than a little surprised at the aggressive lefty slant of the paper. How does such a rag survive in Alberta?
EBD — I don’t know. My initial instinct would be to agree with you, that the author was deliberately misstating truth through journalistic activism.
But, then I think of the lessons outlined by Orwell in 1984. In fact, when it comes to systems of faith (which AGW most definitely is), people can hold contradictory beliefs at the same time (“Doublethink”) without experiencing any crisis of logic. While Chai may be aware of IPCC sea level rise estimates, this would not necessarily be in conflict with her stated narrative.
Just a thought.
In any event, this author is worthy of nothing but contempt.
This stuff does more to shift the public perception. People may not take the time to find out but desperation is an element all species can recognize. It is a primitive response.
The biggest fallacy the AGW evangelists keep pushing is that they attribute every example of the planet getting warmer entirely to human activity.
Too bad they can’t focus that energy on reducing the problems that humans are completely responsible for like toxic pollution.
Never try to argue with a stupid person, they will always drag it down to their level and win on experience.
If global warming is undeniable, (which it is not) then if follows that it is inevitable (who knows that for sure?) then we should prepare to adapt to expansion of farming in north areas. We should be pleased at the energy savings of milder winters.
If we had a slightly warmer globe, life on earth would be even better. That may not be so at the areas nearer the Equatorial zones, but if you look at what lives in those particular regions, you will see that there isn’t really much at stake there anyway.
Just a realistic thought.
They study journalism because math & science are beyond their abilities.
Then they end up publishing press releases from eco-grifting scientists desperate to keep their Gravy & Fame Train rolling along with ever bigger hairy-scary stories about the sky falling & were all gonna die.
Unless they get more research money and funded trips to Bali in February to discuss how evil humans are.
I reckon it will all stand or fall on sea-level – much, much harder to fake than practically any other metric (which isn’t to say they’re not trying)
Assuming for a moment this was true, why would anyone care about the fate of indigenous people? They have no real power but might be living on a land rich in resources. The AGW people wish only to intimidate well-off Westerners. The indigenous tribes are only a tool with which to do that.
“The AGW people wish only to intimidate well-off Westerners. The indigenous tribes are only a tool with which to do that.”
Verily.
Question above “How does such a rag survive in Alberta?”
Answer – Edmonton is full of bureaucrats.
Didn’t it used to be 1500 scientists? Now it’s down to 300.
I recently spent 3 days in the land of the great Suzuker/Vancouver, I made a point of searching for smart cars and priuses, saw one smart car! But we saw 7 Maseratis 3 Lambourginis and countless BMW’s Lexus’s and Mercedes. One would think in the great leftie bastion of Vancouver where a 25 foot rise in sea levels would not only kill thousands of drug addled losers and assorted hookers there would be more fear and respect for their stupid CBC hero? STICK A FORK IN IT you losers in the MSM, you have successfully helped to break the western economies and that was your communist intentions from the start,… but, has it helped your finances, you might start buying your ink in the color RED you moronic jurnolist robots!
http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFN1815479220100711
I really doubt a couple inches (at most) would make that much difference. It’s obvious that raping the coral reef has a far greater effect.
Reminds me of the reporter floating around in a canoe trying to convince viewers how deep the rain water was.
Watch men walking by her in 4 inches of water.
http://www.truveo.com/reporter-busted-for-fake-report-on-live-today-show/id/4285869158
Yo dummy! Just push the boat.
I always thought that water seeks its own level. If the sea level rose in the South Pacific it should also rise here too.
To carry my grade two science further, once an ice cube melts the water level in your glass doesn’t go up because the ice displaced the water already. But, if you drop an ice cube into a swimming pool then the water level will not go up because the weight of the ice cube is so trivial. That’s why sea levels don’t go up when icebergs form.
Am I missing something is the reports’s logic?
The Edmonton Urinal actually provides a public service it reminders Albertans every day why we have not let the socialist run this province since 1904. It really must be depressing to work there. After all these years trying to replace the Conservative Party with a smelly socialist party. Alberta forms another Conservative party that is more Conservative then the Party in power. In the process they vote the smelly socialist into the wilderness where parties go to die. That would be the wilderness of irrelevance. Trying to sell Globull Warming in Alberta is like trying to sell a Chevy volt in Montana. Good luck with that.
Edmonton got its early start as regional headquarters for Ontario/Quebec based economic and political exploiters. To counteract the large numbers of energetic immigrant American settlers in the southern part of the province, eastern Europeans and eastern Canadians were brought in to the Edmonton area to dull things down and vote Lieberal.
July 28th, 2010
Organizers of a group critical of global warming science called off their picnic on Sunday citing “scorching heat” as the District of Columbia withered under yet another day of record 105 degree temperatures.
[…]
Goat Note: If at least one of these images does not cause your own personal localized warming, you are a true Warming Denier.
You guys are all in deep doodoo…Wait ’till BTJ comes home from his day at the University. You blue collar maggots with your big polluting trucks are going to get an eyeful of his superior elitist intellect. I tells ya!
Just let him park his bicycle first, kiss his mother who will take off his socks and sandles, put away his man purse and head down the basement to fire up SDA, organic green smoothy in hand of course.