I'm out of touch, out of step with pop culture and consciousness. My social reader isn't well calibrated. One part of the problem (not the only part) is that I assume that common knowledge includes long known information about the state of things. Big mistake.

Waterlog reported on this truly stunning finding. Shipping produces twice as much carbon as aviation, is growing faster, and was not even addressed by Kyoto.

This has been known and talked about widely for over a decade. And it isn't just CO2 emissions from shipping that are a concern, their sulfur emissions are perhaps even more of a problem. That mindless hustles like Kyoto don't include either air or ocean transport is no surprise since they are not about reducing emissions, they are about authoritarian statist power grabs.

These emissions omissions aren't the end of the drab story since the figures for transport don't include shipping on rivers and canals. That's not a big deal in some places, but in others it is huge and on a world wide basis may be even greater than ocean transport.

So how is it that this common knowledge isn't common? How can people be stunned by decades old data? We don't worry about the right things.

[T]he media -- part of the Fear Industrial Complex -- profit by scaring us to death about things that rarely happen, like terrorism, child abductions, and shark attacks.

We do it because we get caught up in the excitement of the story. And for ratings.

Worse, because many reporters are statistically illiterate, personal-injury lawyers get us to hype risks that barely threaten people, like secondhand smoke, or getting cancer from trace amounts of chemicals. Sometimes they even con us into scaring you about risks that don't exist at all, like contracting anti-immune disease from breast implants. . .

Bird flu was called the No. 1 threat to the world. But bird flu has killed no one in America, while regular flu -- the boring kind -- kills tens of thousands. . .

What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When . . . I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I'm sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.

Parents don't know that partly because the media hate guns and gun accidents make bigger headlines. Ask yourself which incident would be more likely to be covered on TV.

Media exposure clouds our judgment about real-life odds. Of course, it doesn't help that viewers are as ignorant about probability as reporters are.

Fear mongering for phun and dollars is certainly part of the problem, and the media is certainly a primary culprit. But it isn't only done for popularity and profits, it is also ideology.

[I]f you talk to a lay person about bias, one of the first examples that will come up is bias in the news media. A recent Zogby poll confirms widespread belief in the existence of such bias:

The vast majority of American voters believe media bias is alive and well – 83% of likely voters said the media is biased in one direction or another, while just 11% believe the media doesn’t take political sides...

I had a preconception that most people perceive bias as a function of difference from their own beliefs. Conservatives complain about liberal bias, while liberals complain about conservative bias. However the Zogby poll revealed that things are not as symmetrical as I had assumed:

While 97% of Republicans surveyed said the media are liberal, two-thirds of political independents feel the same, but fewer than one in four independents (23%) said they saw a conservative bias. Democrats, while much more likely to perceive a conservative bias than other groups, were not nearly as sure the media was against them as were the Republicans. While Republicans were unified in their perception of a left-wing media, just two-thirds of Democrats were certain the media skewed right – and 17% said the bias favored the left.

Overall, 64% perceived a liberal bias compared to 28% who see conservative bias.

Other research is discussed in the cited post. The results are either subjective or indirect, and so subject to interpretation yada yada. I'm in that independent cohort that has no trouble seeing media bias, and agree that it is far more often left than right. I think this is as relevant to the fact that major sources of emissions are ignored as the phun and dollars argument.

When we consider all the hare brained schemes that have been advanced to cut emissions to a "safe" level, or more agressive efforts to halt the progression, it's useful to remember that they seldom if ever consider the whole story and that their prescriptions, however painful, won't accomplish stated objectives.

We are being poorly served by our institutions. Governments, media and research institutions are all complicit. But then, who is foolish enough to believe that any of them have good intentions or do useful work? I sometimes wish that it was actually possible to throw the bums out and bring in better teams, but then I remember that even if we could find good ones that they wouldn't stay better since the incentives are all wrong. We're stuck with these goobers and the best we can do is to limit their power and influence so that the harms they cause will be reduced.

Consider this report about a recent IPCC report.

The conclusions, in the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, came after four days of sometimes rancorous editing by hundreds of scientists and government officials who have been meeting here since Monday. . .

In a sign of shifting geopolitics on global warming, scientists who worked on the report singled out China among a group of nations that watered down some language in the 21-page summary, while they credited the United States, which for years had stressed the uncertainty in the science, with playing a mostly constructive role now.

China is poised to surpass the United States as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping greenhouse gas, and it has been under growing diplomatic pressure — along with the United States — to agree to binding limits on emissions.

Even though the binding limits omit major sources and accomplish nothing at all.

The report, written by hundreds of scientists and reviewed by outside experts and government officials, warned that adaptation is essential because temperatures and seas will inevitably rise for decades, given the current buildup of carbon dioxide and other long-lived greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere.

But it said that efforts to reduce emissions could reduce, delay or avoid some of the harmful outcomes. . .

Under pressure from countries including Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, sections on coral damage and hurricane trends were softened in the summary. They also got the authors to drop an illustration showing how different emissions policies might limit the harm done.

Officials from those countries argued that data in the report did not support the level of certainty expressed in the final draft.

But some authors were not assuaged. The final document was “much less quantified and much vaguer and much less striking than it could have been,” said Stéphane Hallegatte, a participant from France’s International Center for Research on the Environment and Development.

Negotiations were also prolonged by European delegates’ demand that the final report reflect the need to cut back on greenhouse gases — and not just adapt to new conditions.

“Adaptation will only work if climate change is not too large and not too fast,” Mr. Hallegatte said.

Adaptation is not optional under any conditions. It always "works".

All the money and energy being squandered on power grabs by authoritarian statists would be far better spent on development and adaptation in the parts of the world least able to bear change but most likely to do so. Curing the problem requires technological development and decades of deployment. The sooner that begins, and the more resources focused there, the better. There's simply no justification for euro-style wanking about reductions since they accomplish nothing yet cost hugely, and we have far better ways to spend those resources.

None of this is a secret, or new information, yet the media for the most part declines to state the obvious, preferring instead to repeat the press releases and talking points of politicians as if they made sense. Why? See above.

Update: Said another way . . .

[F]rom the standpoint of global GDP decisions that the world makes that make one storyline more likely to occur than another are between 19 and 74 times more important than decisions that are made about greenhouse gas emissions, under the assumptions provided by the IPCC!

So long as the IPCC, the Stern report, and others use GDP as a metric to advocate action on climate change, then this result is unavoidable. This is the main reason why some people have concluded that decisions about development, otherwise known as adaptation, must be front and center in any discussion of climate change. Yet the IPCC continuously tries to deemphasize the importance of adaptation as development, for instance writing that,

there are formidable environmental, economic, informational, social, attitudinal and behavioural barriers to implementation of adaptation.

Of course the exact same thing could be said about mitigation (but is not said), and by contrast the IPCC always frames mitigation in a positive light:

Many impacts can be avoided, reduced or delayed by mitigation.

It is well past time that the community openly and forthrightly discusses the importance of development pathways as the primary determinant of the future welfare of people and the environment. Carbon dioxide should be a part of that discussion, but not a substitute for it.

Update:

[T]he present bias against adaptation only makes sense if we assume that it is in the nature of bureaucracies to want to accumulate money and power.

I don't think we need to assume this since we can observe it, and have done so.

» If You're Considering Trading Your Gulfstream For a Yacht To Save The Planet, Think Again: from Pajamas Media
Shipping produces twice as much carbon as aviation, is growing faster, and was not even addressed by Kyoto. (IFTF, via Muck and Mystery)......[read more]
Tracked: April 9, 2007 06:00 AM