Crossposted from Town Called Dobson
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On the local FM Talk station, 101.1 WZTK, the morning drive time crowd consists of Brad Krantz and Britt Whitmire, plus the sidekick weatherman, Randy Jackson. And when it comes to global warming, it is the trinity of stupidity.
My ire got worked up this last week when Brad asked Randy about his take on global warming. Randy has in the past been very skeptical about global warming so maybe something in his opinion has changed. Obviously not. Brad’s specific question was about sea level rise, wondering since when ice melts in a glass of water, the water level doesn’t rise that much. Randy of course agreed and seemed to have partially based his apparent disbelief on this scientific fact. But the obvious fairy was not at the radio station that morning. The obvious issue ISN’T the icebergs in the sea, it is the thousands of cubic miles of ice ON LAND, in the polar regions. The worry of sea level rising stems from that source of ice, not the ice already floating in the seas. However, the icebergs in the seas do partially come from this land ice as calved glacier ice.
Ok, I can over look a momentary lapse in reason and logic, this is radio. I have long since given up looking for scientific rationale in broadcast radio.
But this morning came another wave of arrogant stupidity.
Global warming came back to the top of the list of subjects and it was more deeply discussed than the previous ice question Randy Jackson botched. More or less the question of the hour was “do you believe?” One of the callers claimed that we cannot destroy the Earth. We’ll, yeah. That is true. As far as I know Dick Cheney does not have an operational Death Star and the Aldaraan Test has not been scheduled yet. But am I the only one that remembers global thermonuclear warfare? Soviet style? You know, where we can set off enough nukes to make the planet’s surface unlivable? The radio guys seem not to remember.
Thank God we do not have the technology to vaporize the planet we live on, but we do have the power to make Earth unlivable. The climate has always been a delicate balance of wind, water and soil. If it gets disrupted too much, we risk losing a lot of our farm land. Yeah, Canada may have the weather to grow wheat when Nebraska doesn’t, but Canada doesn’t have the soil we do.
But Brad and Britt did keep hitting home the point that we can screw-up local environments like Pittsburgh and Los Angeles with pollution. This must be the obvious fairy at work but her work is far from over. Later on, Britt comments about the movie poster for Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. The poster has a smokestack that has it’s smoke circulating like a hurricane. He doesn’t believe that man made pollution is making hurricanes more powerful. How can a few degrees in temperature create more fierce storms? Although the obvious fairy is making headway, the thermodynamic fairy and the Great Conveyor Belt fairy have some work to do.
Then to cap it off he says maybe if he sees An Inconvenient Truth, maybe it will explain those issues.
Oh, and he is on the radio 5 days a week.
Feel free to email Brad and Brit at this public email address.
