Deceiver reader Sal wrote last Wednesday to our “tips” e-mail address about an NBC football broadcast he saw (I cleaned up a few of Sal’s typos, which I’m attributing to his being a fan of the More Taste League):
During their Sunday night NFL broadcast, NBC had each of their studio panelists tell us what they were doing to keep up with the nonsensical green movement. Jerome Bettis said he washes his clothes in cold water, Keith “the smarmy hump” Olbermann has given up bottled water, and Chris Collinsworth says he walks to work.
Meanwhile, the set for “Football Night in America” eats up more electricity than most small towns. NBC flies their correspondents all over the country, they bring Dan Patrick in for a few minute “highlight” recap (highlights that any football fan has already seen 643 times by the time NBC’s show hits the air), not to mention that they ship John Madden around the country in a luxury bus.
And I’m sure you can find even more hypocrisy in all of this.
Sal … Sal … Don’t you understand? NBC is doing this For Your Own Good. Without their helpful insights, Global Warming will overwhelm the planet, and We’re All Gonna Die.™
Or not.
Either way, NBC has some ’splaining to do, since it has just fired the entire Environmental Unit at The Weather Channel. Smack dab in the middle of the network’s “Green Week.”
From the “Capital Weather Gang” at The Washington Post:
NBC Universal made the first of potentially several rounds of staffing cuts at The Weather Channel (TWC) on Wednesday, axing the entire staff of the “Forecast Earth” environmental program during the middle of NBC’s “Green Week,” as well as several on-camera meteorologists. The layoffs totaled about 10 percent of the workforce…
The timing of the Forecast Earth cancellation was ironic, since it came in the middle of NBC’s “Green Week,” during which the network has been touting its environmental coverage across all of its platforms. Forecast Earth normally aired on weekends, but its presumed last episode was shown on a weekday due to the environmentally-oriented week.
Forecast Earth was hosted by former CNN anchor Natalie Allen, with contributions from climate expert Heidi Cullen. It was the sole program on TWC that focused on global climate change, which raises the question of whether the station will still report on the subject.
Well! At least there’s a silver lining.
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Do more with less!
In these times of global climate crisis (what happened to warming?) and catastrophe it’s important we learn to do more with less. NBC-Universal is just having its Weather Channel division lead the way by learning to do more with less. I for one am proud that NBC is not concerned with things such as it’s employees debt payments or continued fiscal stability in this era of global economic warming-uh-crisis (I guess those words aren’t interchangeable) and is all about the bottom line, telling its employees: Stop destroying the planet, stop going to work!
Okay, unrelated question- is a term used for the female genitalia that starts with a C not allowed on here?
thanks xx
Definitely not. It’s such a lazy way out. If you’re describing biology, there are oodles of more specifically descriptive words available. And if you’re being snarky, and all you can come up with is “the C word,” you’re just not trying hard enough.
Its been cooling for 10 years. I know we don’t expect weather people to get it right every day. But 10 years of forecasting increasing warmth wrongly should be grounds for dismissal.
LOL
How many of these guys thought they had 100% job security, working for NBC? “Dude, I’ll like, never get fired. C’mon, they have frickin’ GREEN WEEK for crying out loud. I’m here ’til the oceans cover Manhattan, dude.”
Bruce – really? Can you show me some (legitimate) data that proves that?
Most of the top scientists in the world agree that we are currently seeing a rise in global temperature. While it is true that the earth goes through significant warming and cooling stages, there is no precedent for the data we are seeing now, which shows the earth is warming at a rate much, MUCH faster than it ever has before. This could very well be caused by human impact.
Here is a government website with some graphical data:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/paleodata.html
I am not a member of the “We’re All Gonna Die!” club, but it’s unrealistic to simply stick your fingers in your ears and say “Nope – global warming doesn’t exist!” However, I’m very interested to see the data you are referring to about how the earth is cooling! Please get back to us quickly with that information.
PS – epic fail for NBC.
EPIC.
@april: “While it is true that the earth goes through significant warming and cooling stages, there is no precedent for the data we are seeing now, which shows the earth is warming at a rate much, MUCH faster than it ever has before.”
April — I think what you meant to write was this:
“The earth is warming at a rate much, MUCH faster than it ever has in the relatively short period of time during which we’ve been able to take reliable measurements.”
Big difference. We don’t have a clue what the earth’s temperature cycles were doing eons ago. We may think we do, but we don’t.
Not entirely true – scientists have recorded pretty reliable data about temperature changes in the earth’s crazy long history (or, as reliable as data can be – it’s still science, not the word of God).
I’m not a scientist, but we DO have a clue as to temperature cycles from up to 500,000 years ago: ways to accumulate this data include the rapidity of rock weathering (the faster the weathering, the warmer the climate, and you can tell this by…well, ask a geologist, it’s been a while since that class in college!); and also by analyzing levels of CO2, methane, and other gases in the air at the time (which is taken from samples of air bubbles trapped in super-ancient glacial ice, among other methods), and….other ways
I’m not saying it’s 100% on lockdown, but there ARE ways of making very educated guesses. Still waiting for Bruce’s data here.
April … you sound like a paleo-climatologist. My next-door neighbor is one too. We’ve had lots of talks about this over coffee.
He tells me that for every 10,000 years you go back in time, the margin of error increases by about 5 percent. So by the time you get back that far, you’re making blind guesses — not educated ones.
True? Or should I stop lending the guy my tools?
Educated guesses are still guesses.
Given that science has been wrong before and that there is a pro-global warming blog that has a post on the myth of global cooling ( http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94 ) or perhaps you prefer NewScientist ( http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/10/global-cooling-was-a-myth.html ) which essentially says not enough was known at the time and that it was mostly played up by the media and opportunistic politicians. But here we are and now we’re dead certain that there is global warming. This time promulgated without the media or politicians.
Ultimately, talk all you want but it’s hard to convince me when it’s 30 degrees outside and it’s not even Thanksgiving.
April – you’re kinda right, and still kinda wrong. What your college professor probably didn’t cover in his manic rush to convince everyone the world is getting warmer because of humans, are the gaping holes in our knowledge about what order the changes happen in.
“ways to accumulate this data include the rapidity of rock weatheringand also by analyzing levels of CO2, methane, and other gases in the air at the time”
Yep, exactly. A geologist can pull out a deep core sample and tell you a lot of things about what the world was like at any given point in time – this is true. The problem comes in how they try to extrapolate their data. Let me give you an example with a direct link to global warming:
Lets say we see a correlation between increased C02 in the atmosphere at a given point in history, right around the time we see the temperature increasing. Now, your first response might be to blame the C02 for the temperature increase. On the other hand, isn’t it just as likely that orbital pattern (distance from the sun) caused the increase, and the increased C02 you see is being released from pockets in glacial ice?
You see my point – they can tell you what it was like, but not necessarily how it got that way. A lot of times you end up playing ‘chicken or the egg’, and can basically flip a coin to decide which trend was the cause and which was the symptom. As long as you’re channeling college geology – try to remember how many times you came across a mass extinction, or drastic climate change. It was those conversations in college that made me a skeptic, not so much for what geologists know, but because of what they admit they don’t know. We know the direct causes of like 2 out of 5 of the major extinctions. The rest of the time the professor would hammer out a whole handful of theories (some contradictory) and end the lecture with, “but we just don’t know for sure.”
Admit it – the amount we actually understand about the cycles of warming and cooling, what is ‘normal’ versus ‘abnormal’, ect. in the grand scheme of the history of the Earth is VERY spotty. Even with hundreds of weather satellites in orbit with up to the minute tracking, hundreds of years of accumulated data, thousands of years of observing the weather, and an intimate understanding of the natural forces involved, we can’t even guess with better than 50% accuracy what the weather will be this weekend. And forecasts get LESS accurate with extrapolation, not more accurate – so what does that tell you about long term global warming forecasts?
Even Al Gore’s scientists got it wrong
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml
The world has never seen such freezing heat
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/11/2008
Have your say Read comments
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running
So if Gore get’s it wrong why should anyone believe in this syupidity.
Anthropomorphic global warming is b.s. The sun affects global temperatures more than any amount of CO2 ever could. Sunspot activity is way down in recent years; the last time sunspot activity was this low was… the little ice age.
Damn, you guys are way too smart for me. I think I’ll go hang out on the Paltrow thread. She’s more my speed.
April,
Satellite data from the University of Alabama
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/03/uah-global-temperature-dives-in-may/
May 2008 was about the same temperature as 1981. It was about .9C lower than the peak in 1998.
The drop was huge from Jan 2007 to May 2008.
April wrote: “Not entirely true – scientists have recorded pretty reliable data about temperature changes in the earth’s crazy long history (or, as reliable as data can be…”
Would these be reliable data collection sites?
http://www.surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm
And while you’re there, check out the national map and pie charts on the home page for a national chart about overall site reliability in the US. Ideal stations are in blue on that map thingy, mid page. Let’s all count blue dots…
http://www.surfacestations.org/
Still confident about data accuracy?
Typical of any overly large bureaucracy, we’re pulling data and making important policy decisions with no oversight to insure that the data remains accurate over long periods of time with increased urbanization.
Modern urban encroachment warming bias is just the beginning of questions on long term reliability.
Who can account for Farmer Ted’s handy dandy home made Nebraska weather station from 1912? Was it calibrated, accurate, or measured when he said he measured it? What if Farmer Ted practiced crop rotation? Some years Ted’s thermometer stood out in the middle of a corn field and the next his thermometer field lay fallow. That spikes his July readings and buffers his January temps by several degrees. What about the year Ted ripped out his tree windbreak to put more land into rotation or how Ted gradually plowed his hills flat? This is all part of normal life on a farm and it all affects Farmer Ted’s data.
And we’re not talking about one Farmer Ted here, we’re talking about Farmer Ted, his brother Ned, Small Village Fred and Big City Ed, all around the world, voluntarily collecting data for various governments over the last 2 centuries.
Reliable data is not the same thing as Historical data.
Were those poor employees “green slipped?”
Scott and Minnow – you do have great points. The “chicken or the egg” idea is a fair way to look at it, Scott. I’m definitely not a paleo-climatologist, I’m just saying that if the scientists are wrong, we don’t really lose (sure we spend money on crazy eco-friendly shenanigans, but the effects would really just be a cleaner environment anyway, right?) However, if they ARE right, and we’ve done nothing and by the time they prove it it’s too late to cause any positive effect, what happens then?
Maybe humans as a species will die out…but hey…we’re kind of due for extinction anyway, in my opinion
It’s good to be skeptical, in all things. I’m not entirely convinced either way, either. Fair enough?
Minnow – nice reference
Thanks D.
For the rest of that arguement, and a very good read, check out:
Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery.
Lotsa charts, examples, facts, figures, history, science… but all in a highly readable format.
April wrote: “I’m just saying that if the scientists are wrong, we don’t really lose (sure we spend money on crazy eco-friendly shenanigans, but the effects would really just be a cleaner environment anyway, right?)”
Oh Simon, ‘Sneer or Holly…
This deals with that recent frenetic-rant-tip I sent y’all.
I don’t want to steal your thunder if you’re gonna use it.
After you.
April :”sure we spend money on crazy eco-friendly shenanigans, but the effects would really just be a cleaner environment anyway, right?”
Wrong. For example, biofuels:
“Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/science/earth/08wbiofuels.html
“Rapeseed and maize biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 per cent and 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels. The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2507851.ece
Polish up your resume? How do you do that exactly. Send in a blank piece of paper, with your name on it? My grandfather was polish. He was the one they wrote all of those jokes about. In fact he invented that submarine. You know the one with the screen door?
Maybe NBC was just providing material for “30 Rock,” in an effort to boost ratings? Think of what Tina and Alec could do with this news…the mind explodes with possibilities.
Yeah Bruce, I am aware that biofuels suck. But I never specifically said, let’s use biofuels, did I? I was kind of trying to end my participation in the thread on a good note. Now I know better.
April: ” But I never specifically said, let’s use biofuels, did I?”
No. But you did say: “I’m just saying that if the scientists are wrong, we don’t really lose (sure we spend money on crazy eco-friendly shenanigans, but the effects would really just be a cleaner environment anyway, right?)”
Biofuels are the perfect example of “crazy eco-friendly shenanigans” that don’t result in a “cleaner environment”.
You remind me of all the people and politicians who effectively said: “What can go wrong lending money to poor people to buy homes they wouldn’t normally be able to afford?”