Convenient? Truth? Propaganda?

[SC4BOY 20]

Truth And Consequences

These kinds of conflicting views is strongly affected by the news media and by everyone's desire to have us believe, often without thought or analysis, their own pet points of views. 

The so-called "documentary" has become, over the last half decade.. maybe a decade.. a major tool of those with points of view to sell. It allows them to "sell a point" without,apparently, even the integrity to view the subject objectively. Perhaps this has always been true, but it seems since about 2000 this has become far more common as the mainstream mass media has become more unified in the overall points of view they want to sell. 

And of course "committees" have always been awash in their own agendas. Hardly an award exists that isn't trying to "sell us something"

I'm sure each of you can present your own examples of these. Does it affect the views of the "masses"?  

[bbfan02 23]

The media makes everything out of proportions. For example, Global Warming. The only reason that they dwell on this that much is because it is a huge story in this present time and they want to get good ratings.

[mayormot 4]

I figure it like this: People are gaining an intuitive sense that the current "Western" way of life requires more resources than will soon be available, and something has to give. They blame the Government and Coroporations (almost the same thing at this point) for "raping the planet" or whatever, when really it's our usury-based financial system that does it (by requiring constant exponential growth in the face of finite resources). Be that as it may, the Corporations fought the Enviros for the longest time, until something changed. And that something is... "The Carbon Tax."

Suddenly corporations are all about greenhouse-gas awareness. It's all propoganda. Here's how it's going to play out:

1) Corporations agree to a mandatory "cap" on CO2 emissions. They spin this as "good citizenship."

2) Government gives out "permits" for the CO2 emissions, to (certain, politically favored) existing corporations only.

3) New entrants are blocked from the market for lack of CO2 permits, granting the existing (politically favored) corporations an effective cartel.

PROFIT!!! goes here. More exactly:

4) Using their new "Carbon Monopoly," corporations raise prices since new competitors cannot appear. This is blamed on "compliance costs," however...

5) The "envorinmental improvements" that this all was supposed to provide, never happen. The money is embezzled by the CEO/CFO instead.

Al Gore gets to be the big "hero" to the ignorant masses, but really, his Nobel Prize is payoff for "taking a dive" and not contesting the theft of the 2000 election. Now he's doing his job of selling us the "carbon tax scam" that his corporate masters are salivating over, the same way he sold out the internet to corporations back in the 90s, giving us such "innovations" as the "pop-up ad." I mean really, do you think the same companies that put melamine in our food and antifreeze in toothpaste and coat children's toys with lead paint and GHB, are *really* going to install "scrubbers" and pay for expensive "carbon sequestering" schemes? Get serious. Gore's a paid shill, and he knows it.

[LarksTonguesInAspic 28]

Gore lost the 2000 election fair and square, and he knows that, too.

[SC4BOY 20]

Originally posted by: bbfan02...... For example, Global Warming. . .....ratings.quote>

 

Haha.. well you could be at least partially right... I recall .. I think it was TIME magazine and the date was roughly early 1971.. had a FRONT COVER story about the "coming ice age" and that the earth had about 30 years to catastrophic glaciation..

I'd say anyone who believes that man has the capacity at this time to significantly influence climate change.. warming OR cooling.. is among those who have pyramids and aluminum foil caps on their heads...

Does this mean we should be profligate? of course not.. but no reason to be alarmist either.. Its kind of interesting to me.. that ANYTIME science is "in consensus" (not provable facts, but "voting on it") time  most always  shows them to be wrong.. science is kind of its own religion operating on faith just like any other.. part of human nature I suppose.. 

whatever happened to the scientific method?  I don't know.. for now the buzzword is "atmospheric simulations" or whatever you want to call the current climatic models.. 

If I didn't feel like a willow in the stream as all the salmon swim by, I guess I'd just ignore it.. but ya have to have pretty strong roots to hold that spot..

[Barbarossa 51]

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  Edited September 7, 2012 by Barbarossa  

[SC4BOY 20]

Originally posted by: Barbarossa...

 focused on idiot celebrities who aren't worth a penny of anyone's time,

Barbarossaquote>

 

Amen brother!! I almost get appopolectic watching evening TV (no cable) when for about 8 hours straight at least 3 of the 8 or so channels I get are some kind of goof-ball "celebrity tracking" nonesense.. good grief.. And why ANYONE EVER gives what one of them says about a current topic even a glimmer of credibility is a complete mystery to me.. I mean the fact that their opinion is even worth microphone time is puzzling to me.. When ya have to fill 150 channels of 24/7/365

airtime I guess anything goes..

[Duke87 1,070]

An Inconvenient Truth is most definitely designed to be propaganda, and you thus can't just take its claims at face value. That does not, however, mean you can just dismiss it as a bunch of bull, either. I'm going to address these "nine lies" individually:

The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro are evidence global warming. The government’s expert was forced to concede that this is incorrect.quote>

Ah yes. Ice suddenly just decides to melt, warmer temperatures have absolutely no effect on that. It is (albeit circumstantial) evidence. What it isn't is proof.

The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO₂ causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO₂ lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2,000 years.quote>

We know for a fact that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas. Just look at Venus. So whether or not the CO₂ rise came before or after the temperature rise in the past is unimportant. The correlation is still obvious.

The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.quote>

True. However, it has become clear that established weather patterns are faltering. Any meteorologist (scientist, not TV weatherman) can tell you this. Though, saying that isn't really interesting, Katrina has more effect, so Gore uses it instead. So while his specific argument doesn't exactly work, if you look at the bigger picture, it makes perfect sense.

The film asserts the drying up of Lake Chad was caused by global warming. The government’s expert had to accept this was not the case.quote>

True. Like with the Aral Sea, that lake drying up was largely due to municipal water being taken from it in massive amounts. This was a blunder on Gore's part.

The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr. Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned because of a particularly violent storm.quote>

...a particularly violent storm. What was that about global warming causing more severe weather? Oh, right.

The film warns that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream, throwing Europe into an ice age: the claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.quote>

...except that it's happened before. And while we're not looking at "ice age for Europe" here, on the dramatic level Gore describes, the Gulf Stream getting disturbed is a very real possibility which would nevertheless have noticeable effects both on the weather in the area and on the marine environment.

The film blames global warming for species losses, including coral reef bleaching. The government could not find any evidence to support this claim.quote>

Well, we do know that coral is very temperature sensitive. So while there's no proof of any correlation, the existence of one seems logical.

The film suggests that sea levels could rise by seven meters causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40 cm. over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.quote>

Key words: "over the next hundred years".

[SC4BOY 20]

Actually it didn't come from Front Page.. they only reported it.. so what's your point? Which "reporter" should we follow since you've placed the evil curse on Front Page?

Here's a great opportunity for ya.. select that news outlet that you feel cozy with, and post the link to THEIR story on the issue.. Then we'll be sure to have "balanced" reporting.. YAY!

[ShortStraw 1]

I think the American media became so untrustworthy after the media de-regulation that happened in the 80's.  During the 1990's pretty much all media outlets were scooped up by a very small handful of corporations.  I used to know more about this stuff, I've forgotten most of it but it seems that 3 or 4 corporations own pretty much every media outlet of any significance in the U.S.

Rupert Murdoch's media empire News Corp. is a glowing example of what I'm driving at.  The man is a strict conservative and not at all shy about using his considerable media power to further conservative political agendas.  This is a significant amount of power, globally as well as in the U.S. and it is used in more creative ways than we credit.  For example, If Mr. Murdoch wishes to drum up support for something like, say, U.S. involvement in MidEast wars, it's just a matter of airing pro-war news stories on his television networks, replaying old patriotic war movies on his cable t.v. stations, financing new patriotic war movies in his movie studios, financing pro-war books through his publishing houses and so forth and so on.

The very few very powerful men who control the media in todays society control our opinions and viewpoints more than any politician or political party.  Media influence on public opinion is pervasive and enormous...either that or I'm just rambling paranoia cause it's late and I need sleep, heh.  Yeah, I'm sure I'm being paranoid, trust the media and everything will turn out fine.  That's what I do these days. 

[Easy Bakes 253]

News Corp, Clear Channel, Time Warner, Disney, Viacom to name a few.

[GMT 389]

first of all, and this is the soon to be geographic scientist in me who sais this:

most of the non-scientists get the scientific term "theory" TOTALLY wrong.

In science (biology, chemistry, whatsoever) theory = rule/fact.

so a scientific theory is not (as the common meaning of theory misleads) a vague idea of how things work, but something that has been proved with experiments, something that is empirically measurable.

the scientific counterpart is a hypothesis.

so, when scientific essays speak of the global warming theory, its not a phantasm but a proven fact

so much for that.

why don't we just stop all this global warming bull...?

there're scientists and essays on each side of the track (I mean those who are not payed by big petrochemical corps and related governments).

but all they can do is take a look at what HAS happened, think a moment or two and then make up a rough idea of what MIGHT happen.

and this is just like intepreting a poem: 2 persons, 2 different ideas; as for the matter at hand, 2 different scientific parties: those who claim global warming is all natural and those who sue mankind and its habbits.

I mean, global warming is a fact. and both scientific parties agreed on this. just like there've been several ice ages, there've been several hot periods, temperature's been rising and falling all over our planets history (otherwise, the ice ages should have lasted instead of comming and going)

now, we are on our ways to a new hotter period -> global warming.

BUT, and this is the main issue: it's happening faster than it has hapened before.

now who's responsible?

one scientific party blames humanity, the other says that this is bull... and that the speed of the current global warming is nothing but an all natural phaenomenon.

but no one can tell for sure who's right

(take nuclear power. people and scientists where certain that nuclear power is a safe engergy (and that the nuclear bomb just makes a huge boom) until they realised that the radiation is very very lethal)

the only thing that can tell us whether humans are responsible for the velocity of global warming or not is time.

only time will tell which scientific party was right and which wrong.

so why don't we just stop banging our heads in (if I take a look at older related topics) from time to time flaming more or less reasonable discussions and wait how things develop?

[Odainsaker 2,133]

Of course, we always have CCTV, the People's Republic's central news channel. I remember many years ago watching a newcast on one of the international sampler channels, marvelling at how sexy the Chinese desk anchor was (much like a stern Bai Ling in somber professional uniform) as she was reporting on the day's events. Then I realized the report being delivered roughly paraphrased as: "...let this Just Execution remind all Loyal Citizens that Treacherous Crimes against the Government and the People by foolish backsliders who fail to obey the Law will be rooted out and Punished with similarly Swift and Severe Consequences! Moving on to today's International Sports news..."

Yikes! You're next, Taiwan, you're next! Ted Koppel and Sam Donaldson are weak puppies in comparison. Err, I'm ashamed to admit it, but somehow the fearsome subtext of the topic being reported and its cold Orwellian delivery just made the news anchor seem even sexier!

At the other end of the spectrum, I listened to one lady refuse to watch Michael Moore's recent health care flick "Sicko" because she heard from the mushrooming numbers of Conservative talk radio shows that he must be a child molester and that anything associated with his political viewpoints are so tainted with child molestation. Such sexual deviancy libels are a favorite underhanded way of castigating crimethink.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Much of the so-called "News media" will jump on anything alarmist to headline for sales purposes.  They have all taken a volume from good old Mad Ave. on this.

The Nobel Committee is obviously out of touch.  The Peace Prize has gone to such diverse people who were obviously not working for world peace, that one wonders what it takes to influence them.

Environment, including Global Warming, is a big, complex topic.  The whole thing has to be addressed as one item, and tweaking one part of it will just cause trouble in some other part.  The current Global Warming trend appears to be mostly a matter of cosmology and geology, and not the puny effects of man's occupation of the planet.  You can't fool Mother Nature.

[GMT 389]

just to enhance the ideas on global warming in an everlasting change of ice age and warmer periods:

there's a multinational contract concerning the norvegian island svalbard (spitsbergen), allowing all signatories to mine there.

one of them is germany, so a sh...load of german scientists travelled up there to see whats there to dig for.

since this also means extraction of large amounts of assays, these scientists took advantage of them and took a look at our planets history.

and guess what they found out:

once more, they discovered that were're at the end of an ice, and not even close to the peak of the warm period.

they compared the local assays with others from all over the world and saw that non-ice-age and therefore "normal" water levels (normal because that makes up the majority of the known earths geographical history) are around 60meters higher than they are now, and that there is exactly no ice anywhere on earth.

with these results (let's pretend they are true), global warming is the cure, and an ice-age is the anomaly; and what mankind defined as status quo is nothing but an early stage of our planets way back to normal conditions.

---

For some of us, this might sound like complete bull..., but I don't see why this shouldn't be true (I don't wanna claim this to be true tho).

I mean, earth's history is a matter of billions of years, mankind's history a matter of a few 10000s of years, and scientific history a few hundreds of years.

how the hell mankind wanna know whats really going on with our planet when the glorious history of mankind (or better science) is a grain of sand in the vast mountains of our planets history?

[Duke87 1,070]

Originally posted by: GMT

they compared the local assays with others from all over the world and saw that non-ice-age and therefore "normal" water levels (normal because that makes up the majority of the known earths geographical history) are around 60meters higher than they are now, and that there is exactly no ice anywhere on earth.quote>

The NOAA would beg to differ with you on that.

Looks to me like the level is mostly lower than today's. Besides, who's to say that no ice is the "normal" condition?

[GMT 389]

see, 2 scientists, 2 different stories. just as I explained above.

the scientists from the report above (it was on one of the news channels yesterday) set no-ice-age as normal because from what they realised, ice ages don't make up the majority of time in earths history. they kinda predicted whats normal by looking at percentages (thats a very beloved way to says whats normality in science)

[david1314 44]

All of you are writing way too much on this. This is a Conservative American er-"Publication" commenting on British legal items. Thanks for the laugh though, SC4Boy.

They claim that "The film warns that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream, throwing Europe into an ice age: the claimant's evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility." By far the most striking claim, though there is nothing stating the court rejected the belief. We may safely infer the court found the stopping of the Gulf Stream to be viable.

[Dandavies87 1]

Originally posted by: GMT

but no one can tell for sure who's right

(take nuclear power. people and scientists where certain that nuclear power is a safe engergy (and that the nuclear bomb just makes a huge boom) until they realised that the radiation is very very lethal)

the only thing that can tell us whether humans are responsible for the velocity of global warming or not is time.

only time will tell which scientific party was right and which wrong.quote>

Originally posted by: N_O_Body

The current Global Warming trend appears to be mostly a matter of cosmology and geology, and not the puny effects of man's occupation of the planet.  You can't fool Mother Nature.quote>

I'd like to know both of your sources - the IPCC has determined that the increased rate of climate change in the next 100 years is almost certainly due to anthropogenic influence. Mans effects on the planet are huge.

Also, GMT, I would say it's completely acceptable to say that the immediate post ice age conditions are normal. While much of the geological record does show interglacial conditions, we evolved to our peak during an interglacial. Therefore, that is 'normal' for us. You can't define species based temperature niches to a planetary standard. In the Jurassic & Cretaceous, conditions were a lot hotter than they are now, therefore they wouldn't be normal for us, but would say, for organisms that evolved to their apex during the Mesozoic (i.e. Dinosaurs).

No one is debating that we are at the end of an Ice age. But you only have to look at graphs of Quaternary climate history to see something is amiss. Yes, it's going to get warmer through natural processes due to the various systems that control climate (Milankovitch cycles, etc). However, up to 6 degrees celsius in 100 years?! Thats at a rate of 0.06 degrees a year, where we should be seeing rates (observed from ice cores and rock records) of 0.0003 degrees a year. Funnily enough, these rates have never been seen before...you guessed it, the industrial revolution. We shouldn't be seeing these temperature increases for thousands of years.

Global warming is definetly a fact and it's almost certainly through anthropogenic influence.

[Psycho_Teddy 25]

I think you've got it all wrong, good sire.

Theories are ideas that have not yet been proven wrong, but have been around long enough without substantial, damning evidence to disprove it, that it moves from the hypothesis category into the theoretical category.  Only when the scientific community has exhausted nearly all of its resources to prove/disprove a theory does the theory become law.  Theories such as evolution and global warming have simply not been around long enough to be declared law.  Have there been any damning, indisputable evidences to disprove them? No, but there is that potential to come up with such evidences, as these theories are very young, in the scientific realm.  I'm not declaring a position on either side in this post, although many of you may already know it.  I just thought I'd clarify that little tid bit.

Even as you put it, "but no one can tell for sure who is right".

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well, my "authority" is my old Geology professor at Queen's University (1957) who always took the position that anything that man has to do with the earth is like dealing with the very thin molecular layer on the surface of the earth.  He always held that Paleontologists dealt only with the "slime on the surface".  Of course, he was a hard-rock geologist and one of the discoverers of the Steep Rock iron lode in Labrador.  I make no excuses for him, as he was of international stature.

All of this warming trend has existed since I was a little kid.  I remember winters with a lot more snow, colder, and longer.  The trend over my life-time seems to be accelerating.

Is global warming bad?  For some, undoubtedly yes.  For others, probably not.  Will parts of the earth become waterless deserts?  That's maybe up to us.  We have the technology to prevent a lot of that, but do we have the political will or are we just going to sit in our mess and whine?

Old saying:  "When the going gets tough, the tough get going".  Very true.

EDIT:  Some southeastern States in the U.S. are running out of water, but they seem to be restrained from at least a partial solution by some kind of environmental treaty to supply water to the Florida everglades.  If people are thirsty, isn't it time to abrogate such treaties?

[Dandavies87 1]

Originally posted by: N_O_Body..the position that anything that man has to do with the earth is like dealing with the very thin molecular layer on the surface of the earth.  He always held that Palaeontologists dealt only with the "slime on the surface".quote>

With all due respect, that is an antiquitated point of view. Theories of anthropogenic interaction have come a long way since 1957; plate tectonism hadn't even been readily accepted.

All of this warming trend has existed since I was a little kid.  I remember winters with a lot more snow, colder, and longer.  The trend over my life-time seems to be accelerating.quote>

Perhaps the issue here is that global warming is an ambiguous name; weather events are getting far more severe, and extreme weather is getting more frequent. Snowy winters are an acceptable manifestation of this statement. Unfortunatly, it doesn't seem to work in that colder regions will become more temperate - these regions will become more inhospitable, as will the already arid environments.

We have the technology to prevent a lot of that, but do we have the political will or are we just going to sit in our mess and whine?quote>

That's exactly why I'm doing a PhD in climatology.

[Duke87 1,070]

Yeah, really. That was 50 years ago. Ask most professors that today and they'd probably say otherwise.

50 years ago, just about every scientist would have thought you were nuts if you suggested that human activity was altering the climate. After all, at the time, there was absolutely no reason to believe it was. But now that's changed.