{"id":226,"date":"2008-01-09T13:05:06","date_gmt":"2008-01-09T08:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/general\/prediction-very-bad-weather-in-2008"},"modified":"2008-01-09T13:05:06","modified_gmt":"2008-01-09T08:05:06","slug":"prediction-very-bad-weather-in-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/general\/prediction-very-bad-weather-in-2008","title":{"rendered":"Prediction: Very bad weather in 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"

A great article from the New York Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I\u2019m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change \u2014 and that these images are a mere preview of what\u2019s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I can\u2019t be more specific. I don\u2019t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn\u2019t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah\u2019s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).<\/p>\n

[…]When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what\u2019s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we\u2019ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don\u2019t have so many vivid images readily available.<\/p>\n

Slow warming doesn\u2019t make for memorable images on television or in people\u2019s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an \u201cavailability cascade,\u201d a term coined by Timur Kuran, professor of economics and political science at Duke University, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and \u201cThe China Syndrome,\u201d minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See full article<\/a>. If you want to get confused about global warming, it might be a good idea to see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth<\/a>, and then go read Michael Crichton’s State of Fear<\/a>. That should convince you to stop getting involved in weighty issues like this and go back to Rakhi Sawant’s antics.<\/p>\n

See also my earlier post on global dimming<\/a>.<\/p>\n

By the way, Al Gore’s movie is an excellent example of how to give a good Powerpoint presentation – as opposed to the bullet-point ridden junk that you usually turn out. (Essentially the entire movie is a Nobel-prize winning slide show presented by Al Gore.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A great article from the New York Times: I\u2019d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I\u2019m afraid I have a different sort of prediction. You\u2019re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told … Continue reading Prediction: Very bad weather in 2008<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[12,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}