A Comparison (Of Sorts)

On Saturday night when absolutely shitfaced pissed I watched The Day After Tomorrow, and even with extensive chemical assistance it was really, really dumb.

Last night, without any reason-affecting substances, I watched a BBC item on global dimming, purloined by the ABC's Four Corners and made their own by adding their own voice-over, no doubt following the BBC script- Liz Jackson where are you? (Too busy playing current affairs show host, bagging News Ltd, Packer's Channel Nine and lame commercial FM radio promos apparently).

Both were based on similar flimsy premises- man-made emissions are causing warming/cooling, sky falling (because it's so crammed full of our shit), many to die horribly unless we all start hooning around on Segways, revert to residing in composite material yurts and live on fungus grown in hermetically sealed humidors.

One was made by Hollywood dips, addled on cocaine, Paul Erlich and an obsession with the importance of them having a 200 year life-span, the other by assorted scientists who had actually conducted research.

The research was pretty extensive- one dingbat based an entire premise on temperature change on the three day period when all flights in the USA were grounded following Sept 11th (although they weren't grounded anywhere else), resulting in a one degree C change in temperature variation. A one degree centigrade change between maximum and minimum could happen any time, due to a huge range of unrelated factors; another climatologist claimed the Ethiopian famine in 1984 was due to industrial pollution in the northern hemisphere, particularly Europe and the USA, ignoring the fact that the Corialis Effect prevents the ready transfer of weather systems from the northern to the southern hemisphere; Ethiopia is just north of the equator, but weather phenomena in equatorial regions are little effected by what's happing in higher and lower latitudes due to this factor.

The area in question is also marginal country (like much of Australia) and highly drought prone- even Biblical records talk of famines in the Horn of Africa. More likely would be weather patterns in the Indian Ocean affecting the area rather than the North Atlantic, as the country is clear across the other side of continental Africa from the Atlantic. You could just as well claim a drought in North-West India was due to the output of coal-fired power stations in the NSW Hunter Valley. The main cause of the famine was pea-brained collectivised farming brought in by the rotten commie regime in power at the time, and the use of starvation as a weapon on recalcitrant sections of the Ethiopian state.

The on-line discussion afterwards produced possibly more moonbats than Richard Neville's site, and certainly no more fruity than any viewers of The Day After Tomorrow who regarded it as anything but entertainment; so which is worse?

Easy- one is run in a supposedly respectable current affairs program, and put forward as undisputed fact, with no attempt to provide a right of reply to those who disagree with the theories (and that's all they are) put forward, and also no investigation into the motives of the proponents of the theory- how many are connected, and even derive their incomes from extreme Green/enviropest groups, and/or have books/videos out that cater to the Chicken Little market?

The other is a feature film that made a lame attempt to portray itself as factual before descending into Hollywood hype and will be as remembered as well as that tin-eared idiot from American Idol in six months time.

The ABC (and the BBC) are a bloody disgrace- their soft left bias gets more hard green every day- might I suggest a new logo to replace their old sine-wave symbol, which at least has a basis in science:-



I believe this one truly reflects their current agenda:-



(Cross-posted at The Daily Diatribe).

No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments containing Chinese characters will not be published as I do not understand them