On Monday, local TV station King 5 aired a special report on
their 11:00 news hour about ocean acidification and its effect on the local
shellfish industry. They spent several
minutes on the topic, but managed to avoid mentioning the words “global warming.”
They did give a partial reason for ocean acidification: more CO2 in the water causes the water to become more acidic, and there’s more CO2 in the water because there’s more CO2 in the air. But they didn’t go on to say anything about the sources of all the extra CO2 in the air.
Ocean acidification is a well understood and predictable
side-effect of global warming, and the fact that it’s now observable and
progressing much more rapidly than climate scientists predicted is a major
piece of proof in the global warming hypothesis.
Furthermore, King 5 viewers need to know where CO2 comes
from: coal-burning power plants (which
make up about half of our utility plants in the US), certain industries
(especially oil refining and extraction), and the tail pipes of our automobiles
(unless you drive a fully electric car or one that burns cooking oil).
Maybe Americans didn’t realize that they were choosing to
drive their SUV’s at the expense of being able to eat shellfish in the future,
but that’s no excuse for hiding that fact now.
Ocean acidification is man-made, not some mysterious natural event,
which is what the King 5 report implied.
There’s no excuse for such an act of journalistic
malfeasance. I felt sorry for Lori
Matsukawa, who looked as if she could barely keep herself from blurting out the
words “global warming, folks, that’s what this is all about.”
We have a scientific community that accepts global warming
as a fact. We have a President who
accepts global warming as a fact. Our
higher courts have ruled that global warming is a fact. It’s past time for the media to report it as
a fact. Because, as the King 5 report
proved, you can’t accurately report on the effects of global warming, if you
can’t admit that it even exists.
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