And, yes, unlike our current president, I am willing to admit my mistake: I missed the Hanley AP story last March. And, yes, The New York Times did run a version of Hanley's story on March 21, 2004.
But considering that this could turn out to be one of the most significant stories of the year and of the century -- representing a harbinger of runaway catastrophic climate change -- I don't think the Times did it justice. They gave it 393 words, buried on page 22, and waited until the last paragraph to mention the ominous word "feedback," and then failed to define the term (Hanley did a far better job in his original, longer AP piece).
A "positive feedback," as so neatly explained in Daily Grist, can lead to a "runaway greenhouse effect," wherein humankind's CO2 emissions start by overwhelming the world's natural carbon sinks, causing them to lose their ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Continued human emissions trigger a self-reinforcing cycle of natural CO2 release and a rapid out-of-control and catastrophic warming. (Human emissions could, for example, produce enough global warming to unlock vast amounts of stored methane in arctic tundra and/or carbon in plant material from dieing forests or rampant wildfires.) Some scientists worry that the high CO2 numbers in 2002 and 2003 are not accounted for by human emissions, and could indicate the start of a positive feedback effect.
Just such a feedback may have caused the Permian extinction some 250 million years ago when 90 percent of all life on earth was wiped out ...
... And as the Permian shows, and as this blog writer learned today, "feedback" is everything. So I stand by my original contention: Climate change is underplayed in the mainstream media, and yes, even in The New York Times. This CO2 story, as reported by Charles Hanley, is critically important to our future, and to the current presidential election. It belonged on page one back in March 2004, and it still belongs there this October.
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bhurley Posted 6:43 am
14 Oct 2004
However, I do think the Times is being responsible in not giving this story too much weight just yet: the researchers who expressed worries about this potentially being the start of a runaway feedback are just speculating, and they would be the first to admit it. The Times has been burned before about giving too much credence to speculation...for example, their reporter Gina Kolata got into a lot of hot water over her story on a discovery that some prominent scientists speculated was going to be the cure for cancer we've all been waiting for.
Yes, the stakes are high in the case of a runaway greenhouse effect, but there are still a lot of uncertainties about what influences the rise and fall of CO2 concentrations. Just a few years ago, the rate of increase in CO2 concentrations was actually declining despite the increases in human-generated emissions, and I don't think scientists have yet figured out exactly why that was happening. James Hansen of NASA, one of the climatologists who has been prominently sounding the global warming alarms since 1988, even came out with some papers questioning whether CO2 concentrations would double during this century (which everyone had previously assumed would happen).
But I totally agree with your main point: climate change isn't getting nearly enough coverage in the media. It's falling off the public's radar screen.
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da silva Posted 6:53 am
14 Oct 2004
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