Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Weather Extremes and Media Indifference

If you've found the news reports of extreme weather-related events unsettling, you're not alone. However, because of a mainstream-media machine tightly linked to many of the industries that contribute most heavily to global warming, the likely culprit behind these events is generally ignored. Few news stories on floods, hurricanes, droughts, or heat waves suggest any correlation with the steady rise in global temperatures. Most often, these correlations are restricted to the OpEd pages, as is this piece in the Boston Globe, Katrina's Real Name. The disaster unfolding in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast is one more link in a growing chain of anecdotal evidence that corroborates what most climate scientists are saying--the effects of global warming are being experienced already in increasingly deadly ways.