The most pathetic part of the whole episode was that I knew that I would find it is soon as I saw the headlines and read the stories.
“A meteor streaked across the sky and exploded over central Russia on Friday,” reported Reuters, “sending fireballs crashing to earth which shattered windows and damaged buildings, injuring more than 500 people. People heading to work in Chelyabinsk heard what sounded like an explosion, saw a bright light and then felt a shockwave, according to a Reuters correspondent in the industrial city 950 miles east of Moscow.”
While reading headlines about the meteor shower in central Russia I wondered how quickly it would be before somebody tied the shower to global warming.
So I did the natural thing: I turned to Google.
And while no one had yet tied the Russian shower to global warming, I found that CNN anchor Deborah Feyerick had recently tried to tie an asteroid shower to global warming.
This from Fox News:
The threat of global warming may stretch so far beyond Earth that it affects meteorites millions of miles away in space -- at least according to one CNN anchor.
“Talk about something else that’s falling from the sky and that is an asteroid. What’s coming our way? Is this an effect of, perhaps, of global warming, or is this just some meteoric occasion?” CNN’s Deborah Feyerick asked Bill “The Science Guy” Nye, head of the Planetary Society, in a Saturday segment.
The sad part is that it’s not just ditzy news anchors who propagate bad science, it’s bad scientists who propagate ditzy news.
It was over a year ago that I first reported to you that at least one climate scientist was propagating the news that global warming was increasing polar bear cannibalism.
In Watch Out! Polar Bear Cannibalism Rises on Global Warming! I wrote:
So it was unsurprising that after dodging that whole hurricane bullet yesterday scientists revealed- or at least writers who have a website with the word “science” in the name revealed- that there could be an epidemic of polar bear cannibals on account of global warming, which by now, we all know was caused by the global meltdown of the real estate market caused by greedy Republican bankers who are both greedy and Republican.
And I continued:
And there is only one thing worse than polar bear cannibals.
That is…drum-roll… all together now: greedyrepublicanbankers.
So, anywho… as I was saying, this website with the word “science” in it called livescience.com asked the question that we all, at least subconsciously, have been afraid to ask ourselves for years: Is Global Warming Driving Polar Bears to Cannibalism?
The answer is: yes, according to people who write about stuff that scientists say on the spur of the moment.
Livescience.com, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tech Media Network, by its own account, is made up of “science reporters, editors and video producers” who have unimpeachable resumes with academic degrees in studies like Olde English, Arts and Journalism. The journalism degree alone ought to disqualify anyone from writing about anything.
Well some of these reporters rounded up the scientists who previously miscounted the polar bear population- really, the exact same guys- sparking the theory that polar bear populations had reached the lowest levels ever- and these reporters did a hard-hitting story about a new theory these scientists have.
Presumably they are looking for a new theory that can be debunked in ten years after millions in grant money is spent studying the theory in order to fill the hole in the global warming theory now that hurricanes aren’t as scary anymore.
So, anywho… “A new article in the journal Arctic,” writes livescience.com, “suggests that polar bear cannibalism — typically the predation of small bears or cubs by much larger adult males — is either much more commonplace than previously thought, or has lately become more common. In the paper, leading polar bear biologist Ian Stirling and nature photographer Jenny Ross detail three recent instances of the behavior among polar bears in Norway's Svalbard Archipelago, each of which was photographed from the decks of ecotourism and research boats anchored a few hundred yards away.”
And the cause of this eco-outrage? That’s right: global warming. The greedy Republican bankers are implied.
Ok, so Sterling made a mistake by undercounting polar bears by an order of magnitude of five times.
Ok, so he’s postulating a theory on the basis of only three pictures.
So what’s the big deal? It’s not like science needs to be an exact art form. Guessing is an important part of mainstream global warming science that has an honorable tradition going back to traveling carnivals in America.
And the great thing is that you can even train a media monkey like CNN anchor Deborah Feyerick to play a part.