A qucik and dirty cost benefit analysis of climate change

The guy in the video talks this up as a knock down argument for acting to mitigate and prevent climate change. It is far from that, but it is one of the strongest arguments you can pack into five minutes (plus four minutes of hype). I'm interested in it because it is exactly the kind of simplified cost benefit analysis I teach when I teach scientific reasoning with the Giere textbook. So I need to note it for the future when I figure out how to create a course that uses the Giere textbook at LCCC.

Exxon Mobil's PR firm creates "homemade" YouTube spoof of An Inconvientent Truth

The DCI Group, a PR firm working for Exxon Mobil, has an excellent record of creating the appearance of grass roots support for their causes on the web. They are the force behind Tech Central Station, a blog that appears to be a news for nerds type website but is actually devoted to spreading unwarranted doubt about global warming and endless positive messages current energy policy.

DCI’s latest? The video "Al Gore's Penguin Army," appears to be a homemade spoof of An Inconvenient Truth posted to YouTube by 29 year old named "Toutsmith," from California. The Wall Street Journal, however, has discovered that the video was actually posted from DCI computers in Washington DC. For those who subscribe the full story is here. For those who don’t here are some highlights.

Nancy Snow, a communications professor at California State University, Fullerton, viewed the penguin video and calls it a lesson in "Propaganda 101." It contains no factual information, but presents a highly negative image of the former vice president, she says. The purpose of such images is to harden the views of those who already view Mr. Gore negatively, Dr. Snow says. …
Traffic to the penguin video, first posted on YouTube.com in May, got a boost from prominently placed sponsored links that appeared on the Google search engine when users typed in "Al Gore" or "Global Warming." The ads, which didn't indicate who had paid for them, were removed shortly after The Wall Street Journal contacted DCI Group on Tuesday.

Via Dale Jamieson on the ISEE list.

More on press releases as scientific communication

So I'm having my students track the flow of information from scientific journal articles to newspapers, and already I've found a case of mistakes in transmission. The students were supposed to start with a secondary source (i.e., a newspaper article.) Many brought in this New York Times piece or this Reuters piece, both of which are based on this article by Josefino Comiso, forthcoming in Geophysical Research Letters. As I reported earlier, none of my students made it to this primary source.

Fortunately, the CJR is doing their homework for them. This post at the CJR blog explains how different news outlets interpreted the story. Comiso's basic finding was that the peak extent of winter arctic sea ice has been declining two years in a row. Unfortunately, the AP and the Sf Chronicle took this information and reported that the arctic sea ice is continuing to melt all winter long, which is just silly. The AP story is down, but the Chronicle story is still here. The CJR blames this misreporting on a bad press release, and links to this corrected press release. Is this right? Here is what I take to be the original press release. Note that both the Chronicle story and the press release take the "what does this mean for polar bears" angle. This New Scientist article, which has nearly the same bad lede as the Chronicle article, also goes with the polar bear angle.

CJR congratulates this Post story and this Atlanta Journal Constitution story for getting it right. Next assignment for the students. Compare as many statements of Cosimo's finding as you can and decide where the error in transmission took place.