Why do I bother reading the New York Times, you may ask? I’m pretty sure if someone like George Will were producing startling evidence he was crazy, liberals would at least be mildly interested.

Paul Krugman, currently in possession of a Nobel Prize for Economics he won for arguing against free trade, is willing to argue one form of treason–that of not having cared about the planet:

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Apparently these studies are so extensive that he doesn’t have to cite any showing actual temperature rises. Instead he falls back on his old stomping ground, MIT, for “proof”:

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

That’s a prediction, Paul, not evidence.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Here is some proof of terrorism. Look at it hard, Paul:

See that? Pretty compelling proof to me. I want to see the photograph that shows global warming. Get Jayson Blair to doctor the photo if need be. I just want to see it.

Meanwhile, there might not be a true summer in the Northeast US and in places like Montana, which has already been forecasted as having no summer this year. Also, all the warming you saw over this century is now gone. We’re going to have to burn a whole lot of fossil fuels pretty soon.

Nicholas Kristof, winner of a couple of Pulitzers, and couldn’t dream up an original image if he were fingerpainting, also has to blather on about global warming:

Evidence is accumulating that the human brain systematically misjudges certain kinds of risks. In effect, evolution has programmed us to be alert for snakes and enemies with clubs, but we aren’t well prepared to respond to dangers that require forethought.

You can bet your patience that the “evidence” is about as intense as what Kristof can absorb from the comfy confines of any Manhattan pub. Who does Kristof interview for a thought on global warming? A professor of psychology:

“What’s important is the threats that were dominant in our evolutionary history,” notes Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University. In contrast, he says, the kinds of dangers that are most serious today — such as climate change — sneak in under the brain’s radar.

So he’s interviewing a professor who is absolutely disinterested in real climate science, and is offering his opinion of caveman history which he has never been able to observe. Any chance you’re going to get to that climate scientist, Kristof? No, another psych prof? Okay, fine:

At the University of Virginia, Professor Jonathan Haidt shows his Psychology 101 students how evolution has prepared us to fear some things: He asks how many students would be afraid to stand within 10 feet of a friend carrying a pet boa constrictor. Many hands go up, although almost none of the students have been bitten by a snake.

Interesting standard of proof. Just a few basic problems, such as many of the climates that our ancestors occupied did not have any snakes. Also, where is this evidence that cavemen were dropping like flies due to snake attacks? How does this factor into our evolution? Wouldn’t we be afraid of any new creature we don’t know all that much about? You might also note the incredibly teeth-grinding stupid part about snake bites. The boa constrictor squeezes its prey and swallows it whole, which is why it is called the boa constrictor and not the boa biter.

But nothing compliments the harmonic stupidity of Paul Krugman quite like this paragraph:

This short-circuitry in our brains explains many of our policy priorities. We Americans spend nearly $700 billion a year on the military and less than $3 billion on the F.D.A., even though food-poisoning kills more Americans than foreign armies and terrorists.

First, people die of food poisoning because they ignore expiry dates on canned oysters, or restaurant workers make mistakes. You can’t warn people not to do this stuff, and no amount of CIA chatter is going to prevent a staph attack. Would maybe a $3 billion a year military budget make this idiot happy? We’ll see how many dead Americans there are as a result of that move. The large US army is a deterrent for every other army in the world. Nuclear weapons save lives by deterring conventional wars all over. (Meanwhile the number of intra-state wars actually went up, likely as a result of no place to invade.)

We’ve created supersonic jets, indoor plumbing and heating, vaccines, space flight, the microchip, all within the last century. I think our ability to adapt has gone way beyond the pale, and Kristof is scolding us for leading our unpleasant little lives while he jets around the world merely observing. Typical of all journalists, they think that they’re integral to all events in the world and leave solving nothing. What was Kristof’s real contribution to the environment? Encouraging people to drive less? (Or maybe making the New York Times’s circulation plummet, reducing the need for more printed tree-murdering paper.) He’s even way off base on his Supermax analysis. People can be in jail and still cause mischief, Nicholas, and even people like Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman can get their lawyers to pass on their orders from jail.

Meanwhile, where is the doom-mongering over the eradication of the New York Times? Their ad revenue is plummeting and their modernization was always in peril seeing as they wanted to charge for online content. Seeing as most of any paper’s revenue is ad revenue and their overhead usually highest for printing and distributing, the charge for reading must have looked a bit outrageous. If the Times were a cuddly mammal fighting for survival, it would be on the threatened list right at the top.

If the Timeswanted to boost readership, they’ll immediately start catering to conservatives and get rid of the obscenely biased liberal news department. Don’t bother telling Kristof and Krugman, either. (Although they’re great journalists so I am sure it will occur to them in short time.) The graph of the temperature plummeting and stories about no winter in the US would dominate the front page, and these two can respond in the opinion section about how they are still right and can denounce us as treasonous and possessing no cognitive development. The jury is still out on the environment, but the evidence is overwhelming that the Times has a bleak future.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 11:43 am and is filed under New York Times, environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.