Christopher Kremmer, Senior Lecturer in Literary & Narrative Journalism, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW, wants to help you shield yourself from worldviews that you don’t like, so he provides a detailed “how to” list of ways to make sure you filter out, specifically, news.com.
This man lectures in journalism. Instead of teaching journalism students on how to logically outplay and counter arguments and spot the flaws, he’s teaching them to cleanse their feeds lest they be exposed to inconvenient worldviews.
The team that has no evidence and no answers has to find a way to compensate for their intellectual vacuum.
Taking control of who gets to send us news
… before I had even typed in my search terms, it was apparent that my options had been narrowed. The news list that the aggregator threw up was dominated by websites whose idea of what constitutes news is very different to my own.
It takes a lot of effort to build an information silo:
One by one, I began blocking offending mastheads, then refreshing the browser to check the progress of my censorship. It takes a while because news websites use multiple addresses to maximise reader access. […]
First came Hurricane Harvey, which barreled into Texas on Aug. 25. Now Irma, one of the most powerful hurricanes on record, is battering the Caribbean and has Florida in its sights.
Jose, currently a tropical storm, trails behind in the mid-Atlantic. And early Wednesday, a coalescing weather system in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico became tropical storm Katia — the fourth named storm in two weeks.
What’s going on?
Hurricane experts say that the formation of several storms in rapid succession is not uncommon, especially in August, September and October, the most active months of the six-month hurricane season.
“This is the peak,” said Gerry Bell, the lead seasonal hurricane forecaster with the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “This is when 95 percent of hurricanes and major hurricanes form.”
As to whether climate change has somehow made this year worse, the links between climate change and hurricane activity are complex and there are still many uncertainties.
Part of the problem, scientists say, is that there are just not that many storms: A dozen or so each year over the decades that good records have been kept do not form a huge data set to work with.
Some climate change impacts seem more certain than others. As the planet warms the atmosphere can hold more moisture, so hurricanes, like other rainstorms, could be expected to produce more rain on average than in the past. And as sea level rises, the impact of storm surges from hurricanes would be expected to worsen, because the surges are on top of a higher baseline.
Dr. Bell and his team at NOAA had forecast that this season would be a busy one, and that is how it is playing out, he said.
“With above normal seasons, you have even more activity mainly in August through October,” he said. “We’re seeing the activity we predicted.”
Since the season began on June 1 there have been 12 named storms, four of which strengthened into hurricanes, with maximum sustained winds above 73 miles per hour. Jose and Katia may well reach hurricane strength in the next few days.
GRAPHIC
It’s Not Your Imagination. Summers Are Getting Hotter.
Summer temperatures have shifted toward more extreme heat over the past several decades.
Of the four hurricanes, Harvey and Irma are considered major, of Category 3 or higher, with winds above 110 m.p.h.
The Climate Prediction Center’s forecast, which was updated in August, predicted 14 to 19 named storms and five to nine hurricanes, including two to five major ones.
Dr. Bell said that in the late summer and early fall, conditions in the tropical Atlantic off Africa become just right for cyclonic storms to form. Among those conditions, he said, are warming waters, which fuel the growth of storms, and a relative lack of abrupt wind shifts, called wind shear, that tend to disrupt storm formation.
“There’s a whole combination of conditions that come together,” he said.
Storms that form in the Gulf of Mexico, as Katia did this week, are also not uncommon, Dr. Bell said.
Dr. Bell said his group does not consider climate change in developing its forecasts.
Instead, he said, they consider longer-term cycles of hurricane activity based on a naturally occurring climate pattern called the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, which affects ocean surface temperatures over 25 to 40 years.
“We’ve been in an active era since 1995,” Dr. Bell said, as ocean temperatures have been generally higher. But from 1971 to 1994, he said, temperatures were generally lower, and hurricane seasons were quieter.
This article gives the details of this study. The good news is that fish seem able to cope with any likely changes that might occur to pH. This is no great surprise as the pH of sea water varies by quite a wide margin across the various seas and oceans and even within them.
“Material insufficiency and environmental problems have their benefits, over and beyond the improvement which they invoke. They focus the attention of individuals and communities, and constitute a set of challenges which can bring out the best in people.”
– Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996), p. 587.
“We need our problems, though this does not imply that we should purposely create additional problems for ourselves.”
– Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996), p. 588.
The rains from Hurricane Harvey presented a worst-case event for Houston, Texas and the petroleum/petrochemical capital of the United States. As such, a lesser known part of the Julian Simon (1932–1998) worldview of human progress comes into play.
Simon argued that there was a driving force or condition for human improvement beyond the institutional framework (private property, voluntary exchange, the rule of law) based on the human potential of motivation, effective use of knowledge, trial and error feedback, etc.).
This element is the very fact of problems and setbacks, which create challenges that human ingenuity would not need to confront and solve as much as in an incremental improvement process.
I applied this insight in August 2010 in the aftermath of the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion. “The recent Gulf oil spill was certainly not anticipated by anyone in government or in private industry.”
Yet it happened. And BOOM, the whole offshore industry had to lock heads to try to find the best way to contain the spill and to eventually stop the same. After 87 days, the runaway well was capped. After about 110 days, the cement held, and the well was entombed.
That was the short game.
And now will come a new generation of offshore technology to ensure that such an accident does not happen again. Whatever the combination of new regulation, insurance requirements, or just best practices for cost minimization, there must be sound, failsafe, redundant technology for safe, spillage-free deepwater exploration. The reprinted article before is one early recognition of this fact.
Offshore drilling and operations are safer now that they would have been without Deepwater Horizon. Post-Harvey, a rebuilt Houston, acting in response to insurance availability and premiums, will be far more flood proof that pre-Harvey. And as oil and petrochemical complex comes back on line (virtually complete as of this writing), fuel prices are returning to pre-Harvey levels.
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[1] I was quoted in the New York Times’s obituary on Simon on this point: ”He believed that the world needs problems because they make us better,” said Robert L. Bradley Jr., president of the Institute for Energy Research in Houston. ”Problems make us better off than if they had never occurred.”
Iowa Climate Science Education 