Wednesday, July 11, 2012

King 5’s Cowardly Reporting


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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