The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
NOTE: James Taranto is out on assignment today. The excerpt below is from the Dec. 21, 2009 BOTW archives:
Think the World Isn’t Coming to an End? It’s All in Your Head.
In the latest example of “accountability journalism,” the Associated Press holds “ordinary folks” accountable for lacking “a sense of urgency” about global warming. The wire service puts us all on the couch:
It’s hard for people to get excited about a threat that seems far away in space and time, psychologists say.
“It’s not in people’s faces,” said psychologist Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. “It is in the media, but not in their everyday experience. That’s quite a different thing.” . . .
Janet Swim, a psychology professor at Pennsylvania State University, recalls a conversation from last month with a taxi driver in Cape Town, South Africa.
“I don’t think there’s climate change,” the driver said. “If there was climate change and sea levels were rising, I would have seen it.”
He was going by his own experience, said Swim, who studies how people feel about global warming. “People experience weather on a day-to-day basis, and that’s how they think about climate change,” she said.
In fact, it takes careful analysis of lots of data from lots of places to tease out the signal of global warming, she noted.
Right, careful analysis involving “tricks” to “hide the decline,” and efforts to suppress alternative hypotheses and to ensure that “lots of data from lots of places” are never made public so that the conclusions can be checked by others. The AP story makes no mention whatever of the recent revelations of corruption by climate scientists–revelations that suggest ordinary people are a lot saner, or maybe just smarter, than the journalists who suggest they’re crazy.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
