Random Prediction

Off the top of my head: As carbon usage gains more and more press, I bet you'll see Major League Baseball restructure its divisions. Instead of having both the American League and the National League spread out all over the country, there will be an Eastern and Western League like the NBA. This would greatly cut down on airline travel, if interleague play continues to be rare. You heard it here first.

Choose your adventure: Global Warming

When you hear about global warming, you have one of the following three responses:

1. Skepticism

2. Indifference

3. Sphincter-tightening terror


If you chose # 1:
Think of a good argument, then refer to this site to find out why you are wrong.

If you chose #2:
Please refer to this site to find out why your brain fails to grasp the problem: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-gilbert/if-only-gay-sex-caused-gl_b_45242.html

If you chose #3:
Please visit this site to find out how you can make a difference.

I'm an energy Superman

I saw a pretty amazing statistic the other day: The average household uses about 70% of the energy it consumes on appliances that are plugged in but not being used.

This is an eye-opening figure, but I've discovered a simple solution: just leave your appliances running all day! With the appliances no longer consuming energy on stand-by mode, you have cut 70% of your house's power usage! Think it over while I go restart my microwave again...

I have seen the enemy, and he is complexity

Introduction
One of the biggest challenges a modern American government faces is explaining complex political ideas in ways that they can be easily understood. In many cases, political parties take short cuts through simplifying the idea. Often that over-simplification takes on the form of a moral maxim.

Example:
Each party is right now trying to boil their ideas on Iraq down to this simplification: BLANK is the best way to support our troops.
If you're a Republican, insert "Staying the course".
If you're a Democrat, insert "Bringing them home."

In each case, the argument is much more complex, but in a word of sound bites and 30-second attention spans any argument that can't be conveyed in 10 words or less is worthless.

Oversimplification and Climate Change
My pet issue of climate change is a major battlefield in the war of over-simplification. Being a largely scietific debate, it is easy to take numbers out of context in order to argue for or against it. In this debate, scientists produce data, and then politicians sift through that data to find information that will support their side.

The following are a number examples out-of-context information that global warming deniers roll out in defense of their argument:

The Arguments and Reality
1. The world has gone through climate cycles in the part, this is just part of nature

Reality: The world does go through cycles, but very gradually. The reality is that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have shot upwards much, much, much faster than ever before. There is no precedent for this big a change this quickly, except for catastrophic events like astroid strikes.


2. Scientists have been wrong about climate in the past so we shouldn't believe them now.

Reality: This is akin to arguing that we shouldn't believe in computers becase some scientists once believed in alchemy. The fact of the matter is that in the last half century the data that we have on the climate has grown exponentially, as have computer modeling programs. Citing scientific blunders in the past is an avoidance of arguing the facts.

3. The temperature is only projected to increase a few degrees. What's the big deal?

Reality: "A few degrees" may not sound like much, but consider the fact that the last time glaciers covered as far south as Ohio it was only 9 degrees Farenhieght different than the temperature today. Seemingly minor shifts have big effects, and worse: once the counter balances are overwhelmed, the increase will continue to grow unabated.

4. There isn't complete consensus within the scientific community. Why jump to conclusions if they don't know what's going on?

The news media has become so sensitive to being accused of having a bias that they have to make sure that all their articles are "balance". What "balanced" means is that you have to give equal treatment to each side. This apparantly remains true even if one side represents 95% of the scientific comunity. If you want useful information, read journals like "Science", and "Nature". These magazines are peer-reviewed, meaning any article that they publish is subject to scrutiny, and must meet fairly rigorous standards in order to make it in. And you will never see an article by a global warming skeptic make it into one of these journals.

Sex, drugs, and vital news (in that order)

This month in the news
Here are some of the most active news subjects over the last month to break over the last month or so:
1. Anna Nicole Smith: died; trial ensues over where she will be buried
2. Astronaut drama: NASA love triangle leads to kidnapping plot
3. Iraq: more bombings; Iran possibly supplying weapons; British begin withdrawl
4. Global Warming: international panel says warming "unequivocably" caused by humans
5. Presidential race: McCain & Obama announce; sharp words exchanged between the Clinton and Obama camps.

To demonstate how popular these stories are, I did a google news search to see how many stories were published on each in the U.S. last week. Here are the results, in order from most to least:
1. Iraq: 157,323
2. Anna Nicole Smith: 20,178 articles (1,000 within the last 15 hours).
3. Global warming: 19,088
4. Presidential race: 17,567
5. Astronaut story: 4,671

Other factors
Some additional factors should be noted when considering these features:
-Global warming got a boost this week with Inconvenient Truth winning a few Oscars and the subsequent attack on Al Gore's power consumption; also from new UN Secretary General stressing the urgency of action
-The astronaut story is now more than a few weeks older than Anna Nicole's story.
-This was a medium-to-low intensity week in Iraq, with action in Afghanistan likely drawing some attention away.

Why I find this significant
The reason why I find this significant is the potential consequences that each of these events have for the reader and world in the future. Here is that analysis:
Possible Consequences
1. Iraq: war has killed hundreds of thousands. More will likely die in the future, country flirts with civil war, hundreds of thousands of US troops possibly to be withdrawn.
2. Anna Nicole Smith: no discernable impact on anyone besides few friends and family members (excludes emotional impact)
3. Global warming: Sea levels possibly rise to displace hundreds of millions of people, drinking water and food supply problems cause famine among billions, temperature and disease changes affect millions, weather events continue to wreak havoc, trillions of dollars lost, Earth becomes unsustainable to humans.
4. Presidential Race: Next presidential electee makes executive decisions that have some economic and social effects on Americans
5. Astronaut scandal: no discernable impact on anyone except the few involved.

My point
You probably understand my point by now, but here it is directly: why is it that we, as news readers, are more interested by the death of an infamous celebrity than the possibility of global catastrophe and a threat to human existence?

This is more or less a rhetorical question. I'm pretty sure that the answer is that we're drawn to things that are dramatic and immediate, and bored by things that are large, slow moving, and subtle. Global warming isn't nearly as imminently threatening as a terrorist attack, and it is not a human entity that we can demonize and worry about. It is big and ubiquitous instead of localized; it is not as easy to understand and fear. Simply: it isn't sexy, so we don't pay it attention.

In the grand scheme of things, global warming is huge and Anna Nicole is invisible. If you were to draw a timeline of the human race on a paper, the period during which we've been able to live in comfort and travel quickly through harnessing chemical energy would be represented by a microscopic tic smaller than the breadth of a hair. We've been in control of the world for a fraction of a fraction of our existence, and we've already brought it perilously close to the edge. It's the equivalent of a 16-year-old being handed the keys for the first time, and totaling the car on a tree in the driveway. Or crashing through the closed garage door. Stepping back and looking at the human race as a whole, I believe that global warming will be the most important event in history, and the fastest. It will have taken far less time than it took us to master fire, the wheel, agriculture. No other major event in human history will have happened so quickly, or have had as big of an effect.

Now that I have expatiated a while, lets return to the media.
Here is my question:
Does the media have any obligation to hold us in perspective on these issues, or can they only be expected to be concerned with making a profit, as every other business is?

I seriously cannot answer that question, but perhaps it would be instructive to observe how the media has covered these two events to get a sense of whether they believe that they have such an obligation:

How the different major outlets compare
Here's a comparion of some major online news outlets. I'm ranking them based on Global Warming articles per Anna Nicole Smith article:
_________________ANS ____ GW ______ GW/ANS
CNN_______________51 ____ 34 ________ .67
Fox News_________154_____ 126 _______ .83
Washington Post____134 ____ 230 _______ 1.72
BBC________________7 ____ 136 _______ 19.4
New York Times______2 ____ 169 _______ 84.5

My analysis
CNN and Fox are in a ratings war, and hoping to eat eachother's lunch, so their ratio is pretty close to one another. They're both shooting for the lowest-common-denominator news watcher, someone who is not neccesarily reading the news for any specific reason, just scanning it to catch up. These are the people who are the most likely to have their eye caught by an Anna Nicole Smith article and click on it.
BBC and NY Times are catered towards a more educated audience, who are apparantly more sensitive to global warming issues and less inclined to be interested in Anna Nicole Smith. I'm impressed that the NYT ran even less articles on Anna Nicole than the BBC, whose readers would theoretically care even less as they live an ocean away.
The Washington Post is a little anomalous. It ran the most total articles on the subjects combined. It would seem that the Post is interested in picking up online gossip readship. Why the Post and not the Times is angling for that audience is beyond me.