Month 8, Day 18: Will Rupert Murdoch Give A Million Dollars To Pakistan?

Incredibly tired. The New York Daily News had an article about Pakistan’s misery, so I used my LTE template to save time.

Good night, all.

As devastating floods hammer Pakistan, it’s easy to dismiss both the extreme weather and the twenty million people whose lives have been shattered from our minds. After all, Pakistan is a long way off. But their extreme weather is a manifestation of the same complex set of phenomena that gave New York its most recent heat wave: anthropogenic global warming. If we as a nation are to undertake meaningful action on behalf of the planetary systems that sustain us, we must ensure that our citizenry is genuinely informed about these issues, no matter how complex or daunting they may seem. The fact that the phrase “climate change” does not appear at all in an article on Pakistan’s misery is a demonstration of how poorly our news media handle the most important threat humanity has ever faced.

Warren Senders

Month 8, Day 8: A Cottage Industry Making Custom Astroturf

The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch ran an AP story about the floods in Pakistan, giving me an opportunity of test-driving my new LTE template. Works like a charm.

Pakistan has been taking quite a battering recently. It’s tempting to think of their troubles as disconnected from our own, but the fact is that both the record-shattering heat wave earlier this year and the catastrophic floods are examples of the extreme weather events predicted by climate scientists as a consequence of global warming — just like those freak snowstorms that clobbered Washington, DC this past winter; just like this week’s high temperatures in Saint Louis; just like dozens, perhaps hundreds, of similar extreme weather events all around the world. Unfortunately, perhaps tragically, our national media is reluctant to address this issue straightforwardly. The fact that the phrase “climate change” doesn’t appear once in an article about weather disasters in Pakistan represents a clear dereliction of journalistic duty.

Warren Senders

Month 8, Day 1: Get Ready For Severe Disaster Fatigue.

The LA Times had an article about the floods in Pakistan. Naturally, nobody mentioned that climate change is one of the primary triggering factors in such extreme weather events.

The tragic flooding in Pakistan’s Northwest territories, like the 128-degree temperatures recently recorded elsewhere in that beleaguered country, are a symptom of a larger and much more profound problem: the increase in extreme weather events brought on by global climate change. Across the USA we are seeing unexpected flooding and storms, with attendant injuries, loss of lives, and property damage. While it is not possible to state that a particular storm was “caused by global warming,” scientists have been predicting for decades that the burgeoning greenhouse effect would trigger more storms, more rain, more snow, more damage. Now it’s happening, just as we were told it would. Even as headlines blaring the news of catastrophic weather everywhere around the world appear ever more frequently, our news media fail to connect the dots. Because we have failed to do something about climate change, climate change is doing something about us.

Warren Senders