| Subject: |
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Re: Re: RealClimate on 1970s global cooling |
| Name: |
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Dave Gardner |
| Date Posted: |
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Jul 9, 08 - 2:13 PM |
| Email: |
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djgardner@btinternet.com |
| Message: |
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I'm old enough to remember the 1970s as well, and it was all global cooling stories until about 1980.
The news media does like to publish sensational stories (obviously), but when it comes to the hard sciences like physics, it does operate within some constraints. So you can publish a story about some huge sea level rise occurring in the 21st century without any comment from the Royal Society, but if you published a story claiming sea levels were going to fall, the RS would issue a rebuttal the next day. There is a direction imposed on the sensationalism. The only British newspaper that doesn't operate within the constraints seems to be the 'Daily Sport' who have published stories in the past like the Lancaster bomber being seen on the Moon.
When the news media does publicise a maverick or minority scientific opinion, it usually does inform its readers that this is a non-mainstream view. So for example the British media's favourite astronomer/astrophysicist used to be Fred Hoyle until he was replaced by Stephen Hawking in the 1980s. Now every few years Hoyle used to come up with some new speculative theory, and as I remember it, the press did tell you it was his own speculative theory. Hawking, even though he might appear to be saying quite radical things to the layperson, is far more 'on message' than Hoyle was.
To expand on what I was saying earlier about the 1970s relativity sceptics, if the news media had taken up their cause it would have been quite a sensational story. The sceptics thought that the relativity ideas of 'time dilation' (which means that time travel into the future is regarded as possible) and 'space contraction' were nonsense. A scientific establishment that believes in time travel opposed by a bunch of elderly breakaway boffins would be gteat material for the newspapers. I've always assumed that the scientific establishment somehow managed to stop the relativity sceptics getting a platform. Any doubts over special relativity might affect funding for particle physics, the major research area in physics. |
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