NY Times covers extraordinary western heat wave without mentioning climate

change.

"PHOENIX, July 22 - A relentless and lethal blanket of heat has settled on much of the western United States, forcing the cancellation of dozens of airline flights, threatening the loss of electrical power, stoking wildfires and leaving 20 people dead in Phoenix alone in just the past week...

...Daytime highs in Phoenix have remained near 110 degrees for more than a week, and municipal officials acknowledge that it is almost impossible to deal with the needs of the estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people living on the streets...

...Officials of the National Weather Service estimate that more than 200 heat records have been broken in the West during the last two weeks. On Tuesday, Las Vegas tied its record for any date, 117 degrees. Reno and other locations in Nevada have set records with nine consecutive days of temperatures at 100 or higher. The temperature in Denver on Wednesday reached 105 degrees, making it the hottest day there since 1878. The highest temperature for the entire region during the heat wave has been 129, recorded at Death Valley, Calif..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/23/national/23heat.html?hp&ex=1122177600&en=73a1b4a3cb8c3ebb&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Nary a word on the confluence of extreme weather events and the clear cut scientific reasons behind them.

There was, however, an editorial about a "flat earth" repuke badgering scientists at a congressional hearing:

"It's going to be hard enough to find common political ground on global warming without the likes of Representative Joe Barton harassing reputable scientists who helped alert the world to the problem in the first place.

Mr. Barton is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and thus has great influence over energy strategy, which badly needs updating to address issues like warming. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Mr. Barton has also been a leading beneficiary of campaign funds from the oil, gas and utility industries, which have belittled the warming threat and resisted regulatory efforts to control the burning of fossil fuels. Mainstream scientists believe such fuels are responsible for the warming trend in the last century.

Mr. Barton, a Texas Republican, has zeroed in on three climatologists - Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes - who have presented influential data showing a sharp rise in global temperatures in recent decades.

Their conclusions have never been convincingly challenged, and indeed have received strong support from other researchers taking different analytical paths..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/23/opinion/23sat1.html?

We, the Americans, have voted for these religious dogmatists of the type Mr. Barton represents. The world should cut off our credit cards before we kill again.

Recently there was a report on the number of toxins a baby is born with in the United States. Within an hour the reports covering the entire story were replaced with reports on how "some chemicals" have "decreased" and ignored the major alarms of new ones or the increases.

The heat wave is yet another. I haven't seen any scientific studies blaming the heat wave on global warming until after the fact (France last year) but it sure seems to me that living on this planet for awhile the temperature has increased and has turned summer into an inferno.

I mean, no matter how much you have stashed in your bank, you'll be living under the same climatic conditions as everyone else. It's something Joel Bakan mentions in 'The Corporation' movie - nobody likes to live next to a polluted lake, and no-one wants to breathe carcinogens, that includes CEOs. This goes double for global climate change. At what point do people become such mindless corporate drones that they have lost even the self-preservation instinct?

(edited for typos)

I"m sure they calculate how long *they* are on the planet, screw their own kids and go for profit anyway.

I saw that too, I especially loved the section which describes sociopathic behavior and then went through the definitions of the business entity: corporation, a man-made philosophy.

elephant in the living room. You'll learn the color of the bedroom curtains, though...

They fucking MADE FUN of overflowing morgues and crumbling emergency services, wondering rhetorically why those fussy Europeans didn't do the sensible thing like Americans - i.e. install air conditioning and fill their water glasses to the top with ice.

And you're wondering why the reality of climate change isn't seeping under the crack beneath the newsroom door?

Especially how atmospheric CO2 has jumped in just the previous year.

The Arctic tundra hasn't just been thawing; in some areas it has been exposed to tropical conditions. All those new cellular carbon dioxide and methane factories where there used to be ice and snow! The tundra should smell like the dumpster behind a restaurant within a few years. CO2, methane, ammonia -- a little bit of Jupiter, baked in authentic brick ovens, and served to the world.

And after the seas lurch to a halt, the winter will come.

--p!

And it was all preventable but the shrine of the quick buck trumped morality. Ironic that plenty of bucks and jobs could be created by changing things.

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yes, we're all flighty chicken-littles, with no analytical capability, and no knowledge of climate history like the Dust Bowl.

It's no wonder we crack you up.

At least three of the participants in this forum are professional scientists, and some of us have followed the issues since the early 1970s. But we're fools, compared to, say, a 20-year-old swashbuckling intellectual firebrand, bucking the stark conformity of a world ruled by Political Correctness, rebelling to the last, levying mutiny among the squares, with a bottle of rum in one hand and a toothsome wench in the other.

And it sounded just as dumb when P.J. O'Rourke did it in 1973.

--p!

It may be that the reporters don't really know how to tie the two together. While so many extreme wether events in such a short period of time has meaning here. This may not be well understood by the typical person at the Times, and certainly not understood by the average american.