“The Rag”
Originally, “The Rag” was a nostalgic commentary on my childhood experience with the New York Times and the New York Daily News. It is also included in this post later on, for clarity.
“The Rag”
You may have seen the news report. The Ministry of Truth titled it “Losing Earth…and some other nonsense.” (I understand the title was re-edited.) The basic notion of the piece was that the science of climate change/global warming was settled by the beginning of the 1980’s and that we lost the battle to fix the problem due to ineptitude by those working for George Bush Senior, who the article claimed, was a great environmentalist (side note: Are you fucking kidding me?) and a lack of political savvy by climate scientists to marshal the forces of change; as well as some minor infractions by the oil and gas companies while they were working to help us.
giggle smirk chortle
What the Ministry of Truth conveniently left out was that the impacts of excessive GHGs (Greenhouse Gases) was unclear. Meaning there was agreement that we were pumping out too much Carbon Dioxide and there would be a change, but it was murky as to what would happen. That’s a long, long way from addressing human induced climate change.
Here is why the science was so far from stopping climate change back then. In the 1980s and into the early 1990’s the key questions on human influence of the changing climate centered on the feedback loops created by excess GHGs. For example, we knew temperature rise of one degree C would modify the carrying capacity of the atmosphere for water vapor. Would more clouds mean less warming or more warming? Would any albedo change be to the positive (which would slow down the warming) or to the negative (which would increase the warming)? Would more carbon dioxide make more food for us or less food for us? Would a slowing Gulf Stream correct the warming by cooling parts of the planet or would the slowing current make things worse? The list goes on and on–and feedback loops in a chaotic system, like the climate, determine the nature of events. Knowing the science of how an atmosphere works does matter, but it is far from answering the question of: Is Global Warming a crisis requiring emergency measures, or any measures at all?
So confusion comes from the following questions–in a broad stroke. If some of the feedback loops are positive and some are negative then we had time to fix things. If most of the feedback loops are negative, working against the warming, then there are no worries we have lots of time. If most of the feedback loops are positive then we have to act, quickly. These questions were settled by the mid-1990s–but not the mid-1980s.
My ongoing issue with the Ministry of Truth has been, and continues to be, that it always leaves out the salient points. Their article “Losing Earth…and some other nonsense” is just that. “Losing Earth…” ignores industry’s strategy of hiding the impacts of Global Warming—impacts that were clear to all by the mid 1990’s and buried under a mountain of petro-dollars–in a slick multi-media article meant to drop the responsibility of failure onto a misinformed electorate for a cataclysm that they were not able to address in the first place.
By the mid-1990’s, science had determined that almost all of the natural positive feedback loops had kicked in, while the negative feedback loops were negligible making human induced climate change (anthropogenic forcing of the radiative balance) a clear and present danger. Or, as the US Department of Defense called climate change in one of their reports, “A threat multiplier.” Worse, the fossil fuel industry kept, and continues to keep, clarity outside of mainstream visibility here in US stifling innovation and solutions. Which is why the rest of the planet knows the dangers of the new climate regime and we remained baffled, rattled, and unable to mount an effective strategy for dealing with global warming. (PM dispersal is a monkey-response to Chaos that will just make the climate emergency worse.)
And what should you do to help? Vote, at your local networked computer. WCGW?
My Original:
“The Rag”
In the early 60’s, The Big Apple (The New York Metropolitan Area) was my home.
There were two key newspapers, The New York Times, “Oh I just love the Sunday crossword puzzles don’t you?” “No.” And The New York Daily News–The Rag.
Pictures filled The Rag from front to back. The first pages covered the news. The rest of it had sports, comics, society, commentary, police, Broadway, Off-Broadway, music, reviews, happenings, and the movie schedule for the New York Metropolitan Area–over 50 pages of down-home-big-city-sensationalism. A true New Yorker knew all about the tabloid bent of The Daily News so we always started reading it from the last page forward for the Sports coverage–like my dad did. He was a baseball nut.
The Daily News was for the subway, waiting for a haircut, or a leftover read at the lunch counter–because it took so little effort–all photos and headlines. To the contrary, the New York Times was text and more text, brunch and the boardroom. Pictures were few and far between. The Times had – “All the news that’s fit to print” – A commitment to excellence pasted in the top right hand corner of the front page. We city-folk knew only relevant, useful news that meets the social and moral obligation of a top-flight news service would grace the pages of the Times. We were New Yorkers. We knew where the facts lie.
(Of course, this is long before Fox News in Florida convinced a federal judge that news was entertainment and therefore Fox, or any news outlet, had no obligation to tell the truth in any of its reporting. Or to put it another way, Fox brought forth fake news upon the Earth and it was bad.)
Regardless, back then there were The Papers. Worth a Sunday-morning drive with my dad over to “Sid’s.” I entered the corner store, grabbed The Papers, then I attacked the metal spinner seeking new comic books. The trek always concluded with me schlepping newspapers–each seemingly a ton or more–into the Oldsmobile. Truth was, if I were to get my twelve-cent comic into the house, the Papers entered first–regardless of tonnage.
As the dolly-man laboring under these Sysiphysian weights, I therefore considered myself an expert on news content when I was ten. The Times weighed more; therefore, it was better news. More is better, right? Newsprint littered the house–sometimes until Tuesday night–not my problem. Mom hefted that cleanup because Tuesday night was Mah Jong.
I was about twelve when I acknowledged I should read the papers like all the other adults. I glanced at The Rag, starting with Sports, of course. Then, I examined the Times from the front page to the Times Magazine lingerie ads. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” my brother once declared. I saw why at the age of twelve.
My teens had erupted, and I was informed. The news mattered. Information is power. I was beginning to understand what was going on around me. The who, what, when, where, and why made a mysterious world clearer than it had been because there was never a doubt about authenticity. (I had discovered error checking by comparing the data sources.) Then later in life, I realized critical thinking mattered more than BI–big data has no conscience.
Time went on and I drifted across the country, away from the Times and the News.
Then this year, Fascism crept out of the closet into the US mainstream–thanks to software-based vote-counting machines electing a PPOTUS, the big-bad-Russia-as-Boogey-Man-they-did-it-to-our-election, and the caught, bought, snort, and naught Legislative branch.
Then a few weeks ago, pictures of the Traitor-in-Chief popped up on the net–spread like birdshit on a cage floor. Pictures of a clown, a murderer, an abductor of children, a tart for hire, and a thug all with accompanying headlines directed at our lobbyist-run legislative branch neck-deep in a race to usurp the Constitution and replace it with a balance sheet. OMG, those pictures were from The Rag. Could it be? The Rag as light through an evil passage filled with billionaire oil-crazed sociopaths wandering like zombies sucking the life out of the country. The-New-York-Daily-News-holy-shit-is-calling-cowards-to-task. Hot damn! What about the Times? Wow, I bet they are kicking some serious butt.
No. What?
Nothing–just cowardice hiding behind the supposedly tempered logic of a well-mannered cosmopolitan editorial board stroking their Prius–I went back to The Rag. The Daily News had a street-rage at the vile embrace of Fascism infesting DC and the stupidity of Socialism I simply adored. Hot damn. Something else is going right, besides our fearless Department of Justice.
…Rah rah ree! Kick ‘em in the knee! Rah rah rass…
Then the editorial board of the New York Daily News gets shown the door–along with half of the news staff–supposedly for profit concerns. And then Congress tries to impeach an unimpeachable member of DOJ. And then the Traitor-in-Chief commands DOJ subservience–placing him above the law. Oh, I see, rich megalomaniacs aren’t going to roll over for truth to save lives.
Oh, so that’s what’s been happening with global warming. They aren’t really denying the science. Leadership just doesn’t give a damn what happens to you or those you love. Funny, I couldn’t find anything on that in The Papers. I guess now I never will.
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