2010′s world gone wild: Quakes, floods, blizzards: The Associated Press has published one of the most biased pieces of environmental science journalism in a long time, and that’s quite a feat in itself. Indeed, there are some serious journalistic integrity issues with this clearly biased piece: the authors intersperse anecdotes with specific scientists’ quotations while playing fast and loose with the facts in order to push an agenda. Undoubtedly, there is a considerable amount of scientific ignorance on the part of the authors, but using the human suffering associated with 2010′s natural disasters as talking points in this narrative is a new low for the Associated Press.
This article by Seth Borenstein and Julie Reed Bell deserves a thorough fact-checking and deconstruction. Keep your vomit bags and pitchforks at the ready, and hold onto your seats on this Pulitzer-prize winning fictional roller coaster…
This is an absolute masterpiece: quotations are in the boxes, comments are mine.
This was the year that the Earth struck back. Earthquakes, heat waves, floods, volcanoes, super typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts killed at least a quarter million people in 2010 – the deadliest year in more than a generation. More people were killed worldwide by natural disasters this year than have been killed in terrorism attacks in the past 40 years combined.
What purpose does this statement serve? Is there a moral equivalence between suicide bombers and the heartbreaking suffering associated with Haiti’s earthquake, the resulting mysteriously-caused cholera epidemic, or the devastation associated with the Pakistani floods? Apparently there is, as the authors make that case that it is either human-caused or exacerbated.
And we have ourselves to blame most of the time, scientists and disaster experts say.
That didn’t take long.
Even though many catastrophes have the ring of random chance, the hand of man made this a particularly deadly, costly, extreme and weird year for everything from wild weather to earthquakes.
There is no doubt that the impoverished around the world suffer disproportionately from natural disasters: their ability to mitigate is very limited with poorly constructed buildings and standards of living that could further unravel by nature’s tragic pulling on the threads of survival. Earthquakes occur without regard to the dwellers above the ground. Tropical cyclones occur without regard to the topography in their path. Weather and seismic activity cannot be controlled; it can only be adapted to with the best possible disaster prevention. This fact is not ground breaking or in any way controversial, yet it is seemingly brought up, acknowledged, and summarily dismissed while Borenstein and Bell get to work on blaming humanity for the ills of the Earth.
Climate scientists say Earth’s climate also is changing thanks to man-made global warming, bringing extreme weather, such as heat waves and flooding.
Some climate scientists perhaps, but there is current NO peer reviewed literature that DIRECTLY connects the floods in Pakistan or the heat wave in Russia definitively to anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, there are scant scientifically diligent explanations available for the weather/climate events of 2010, but here’s one from the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory Climate Attribution or CSI outfit on the Russian heat wave. Note, this is also a draft document, and not peer reviewed (yet), but with the extent of the data analysis from inside, it has a helluva lot more weight than the word of scientists who have not demonstrated or presented similar data analysis on the Russian heat waves or the floods. Instead, as Borenstein and Bell helpfully intersperse in the article, scientists are giving expert testimony on the events without tangible evidence, but perhaps intuition, feelings, or political motivations, which are superfluous anyways to the situation at hand.
Read more:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/19/associated-press-gone-wild-2010-disaster-article-is-unadulterated-trash/#more-29705
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