For the record, I believe in global warming.
I also believe in the inevitability of universities, think tanks and interest groups to generate publicity by pumping out impossible-to-prove research studies that predict dire consequences of the big melt-down.
And I believe in the tendency for many media outlets to run impossible-to-prove melt-down predictions as hard news without so much as a raised eyebrow, much less a reality check.
Take for example an alarming story in the Rocky Mountain News announcing that “Warming may be death of state's winter sports.”
According to an annual report issued by the small but prestigious Colorado College, decreasing snowpack could eliminate the state's entire ski industry by the year 2085.
The “gloomy forecast” – as the Rocky so helpfully labeled it – basically projects what might happen if “use of motor vehicles and other greenhouse gas-producing practices continue at the present levels.”
Using the same logic, I figure that in 79 years a lift ticket at Vail will cost something like $1,368.95 plus tax. So only billionaire Texans will be able to afford to ski on what little snow that’s left anyway.
Of course, nothing continues at present levels for 79 years. Committed optimists and pessimists alike agree that progress is as certain as it is unpredictable. Seventy-nine years ago, a guy named Einstein thought that “there is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable.” Seventy-nine years from now we may all be getting our groceries telepathically.
Changing public attitudes, evolving market forces, new knowledge and technologies we haven’t even heard of yet will do as much – if not more – to shape our future than the “present levels” of our past.
And that’s what makes global warming reports stories like these sound suspiciously more like cause-related marketing publicity rather than new information serving the public interest.
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Tags: Rocky Mountain News, global warming, ski, PR, business, news media
