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The biggest question, though, remains the extent to which climate change is the driver of hurricanes, cyclones and flooding that have hit the world with apparently increased ferocity and regularity in recent years.
It is still proving extremely difficult for scientists to extract a clear sign of the effects of climate change from the normal long-term historic cycles of weather and climate activity. That is despite simple logic saying that a warmer climate should result in more powerful storms because of a greater water content in the atmosphere.
Axel Lehmann, chief risk officer at Zurich Financial Services, says it is necessary to take a long-term perspective – of 200 or even 1,000 years.
“In terms of severity and frequency, is this type of event happening in a more systematic way? We do not yet have an answer on that,” he says.
“But on a systematic basis we do know that a growing population puts pressure on the earth and its resources.”
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Apr
8
2012
As intellectual, compelling, and truthful Katie Couric’s opinions on the media representation of women are, the film would have been so much more balanced if they, for instance, gave the young high school students at the opening of the film as much face-time as they did their more privileged interviewees. The film ends up painting a very limited picture of what women are or should be, and this juxtaposed with its ideology of “you can’t be what you can’t see” raises a huge problem. The people we don’t see in Miss Representation are women of less privilege, women with disabilities, and so on; the film ends up obscuring the ways that women are different other than just existing as a collective sisterhood.
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The staggering statistics about how much of the media industry is owned and controlled by men and how lacking the industry is in gender equality is equally shocking.
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the thing that unsettles me most about Miss Representation is its glaring lack of sufficient representation for women of color, women with disabilities, and women of less privilege than the well-to-do upper-middle class CEOs, politicians, and celebrities that we see on screen. As professors and students alike pointed out in the panel discussion after the film, one can’t help but wonder if this approach is entirely too self-defeating. While the film’s aim is to point out the misrepresentation of women in the media, does it misrepresent women in the process of doing so?
Camila Vallejo is beautiful! She’s glamorous! She’s captivating and young! She is a favorite topic in the tabloids! She has a secret boyfriend she kisses “languorously!”
And that is why she is a popular and effective leader in Chile’s student revolution.
The New York Times Magazine dedicates an inordinate amount of space over its seven pages relaying anecdotes about her looks and explaining how captivating her appearance is, rather than, you know, offering a detailed account of her personal history or, say, an in-depth look at her politics.
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It is certainly valid to analyze the role the prominent person’s appearance plays in their public perception. But from the title on down, the article fetishizes her looks, makes it a focus of the profile, and tacitly uses it to explain away her power and popularity. Not only does this lead to a one-dimensional rendering of her story, it undermines her work and person.
Jan
30
2012
any conclusion about the pace of emissions cuts necessary to limit dangers from climate change is implicitly as much (or more) about economics as science.
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climate change is a complex phenomenon, subject to great uncertainty, with changes in our knowledge occurring virtually daily. Climate change is unlikely to be catastrophic in the near term, but it has the potential for serious damages in the long run. There are big economic stakes in designing efficient approaches. The total discounted economic damages with no abatement are in the order of $23 trillion. These damages can be significantly reduced with well-designed policies, but poorly designed ones, like the current Kyoto Protocol, are unlikely to make a dent in the damages, will have substantial costs, and may cool enthusiasms for more efficient approaches. Similarly, overly ambitious projects are likely to be full of exemptions, loopholes, and compromises, and may cause more economic damage than benefit.
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the best approach is one that gradually introduces restraints on carbon emissions. One particularly efficient approach is internationally harmonized carbon taxes – ones that quickly become global and universal in scope and harmonized in effect. A sure and steady increase in harmonized carbon taxes may not have the swashbuckling romance of a crash program, but it is also less likely to be smashed on the rocks of political opposition and compromise. Slow, steady, universal, predictable, and boring – those are probably the secrets to success for policies to combat global warming.
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Jan
1
2012
Regular readers will know that I think that the print media overall has done a pretty good job on covering the science of climate change, if not always getting the politics right. They will also know what I think about the "debate" over climate change and extreme events (above). But every once in a while I see a story that is so breathtakingly bad that it is worth commenting on. Today's installment comes from Justin Gillis at the New York Times and was published on Christmas Eve. The article is so bad that it might just be the worst piece of reporting I've ever seen in the Times on climate change.
Dec
22
2011
Omitting to mention that the speaker you’re quoting is quoting someone else can be a little misleading. That didn’t stop TOC, whose report on a TV forum is headlined, “MP Seng Han Thong: SMRT’s unpreparedness also due to Malay and Indian staffs English language inefficiency”.
TOC’s reporter goes on to say, “He said that because some staffs are “Malay(s), they are Indians, they cannot converse in English good, well enough”.”
What Seng actually said was, “And I notice that the PR mentioned that some of the staff, because they are Malay they are Indian, they cannot converse in English good, well enough, so that also we can learn from. I think we accept broken English.”
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As he spoke, he waved at the laptop screen facing the panelists, which presumably displayed comments from viewers. Seen in context, Seng was quoting the comment as part of a larger point he was making, that SMRT should have proper SOPs in place, and that in an emergency the drivers’ standard of English is no excuse for silence.
As an MP (and NTUC leader representing workers), Seng can certainly be faulted for not distancing himself explicitly from the view he was citing (although he may have made a point of saying that the view came from a permanent resident as a hint that no true Singaporean would say this).
Dec
13
2011
Scary climate stories rely on a simple narrative: more CO2 means more environmental damage and death – and the only way to address it is to cut carbon emissions. While this makes for a catchy political message, it has the distinct disadvantage of being wrong.
Global warming will cause certain phenomena, such as heat waves and hurricane wind speeds, to become more extreme, while others, including cold waves and hurricane frequency, will become less so. And, in some cases, such as increasing precipitation, global warming will have both positive and negative effects.
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Considerable evidence does suggest that global warming causes increases in rain, especially heavy rain. That has led many observers to blame global warming for devastating floods in Pakistan, Australia, and Thailand in recent years. But the IPCC tells a different story: the evidence cannot even reliably indicate whether increased precipitation has, in fact, affected the floods’ magnitude and frequency (in UN-speak, “low confidence at the global scale regarding even the sign of these changes”).
That may sound counter-intuitive. But much more important changes have taken place: in particular, construction of dams and large settlements on floodplains has left rivers nowhere to flood naturally. If we want to help potential flood victims, the evidence clearly shows that we should restore floodplains.
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Increased precipitation also has positive consequences – most significantly, more fresh water for a thirsty world. Today, about two billion people are water-stressed, meaning that they make do on less than 1,700 cubic meters (60,035 cubic feet) per year. Population growth alone suggests that this number could increase to about three billion towards the end of the century. But more precipitation from global warming will most likely bring the actual number down to about 1.7 billion.
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Dec
8
2011
Over the course of my graduate degree, I slowly became more and more aware of the bad information in the media about science, ultimately leading to my interest in the skeptical movement. When I decided to a talk at Skepticamp Winnipeg 2011, I realized that I needed to address the way science exists in the public eye and how its relationship to media has changed over the years. There’s a little bit of history, a little bit of humour, and an honest assessment of where science needs to go if it’s going to continue to have a relationship with the public audience. If you want to see what’s written on the slides, I recommend going full screen in HD.
Dec
2
2011
The editor-in-chief of More—a magazine for women over the age of 40—Lesley Jane Seymour, said that due to the increased online publicity of before and after images that betray the real person behind the beautifying mask of Photoshop, readers have become sophisticated enough to figure out the deception involved when photo editors go a little too far with their digital scalpels.
While readers want their celebrities to look good, they also want them to look like real people instead of plasticised Barbie dolls. “Readers aren’t fooled if you really sculpt the images,” Seymour said. “If you’re a good editor, you don’t go too far these days.”
The editor-in-chief of More—a magazine for women over the age of 40—Lesley Jane Seymour, said that due to the increased online publicity of before and after images that betray the real person behind the beautifying mask of Photoshop, readers have become sophisticated enough to figure out the deception involved when photo editors go a little too far with their digital scalpels.
While readers want their celebrities to look good, they also want them to look like real people instead of plasticised Barbie dolls. “Readers aren’t fooled if you really sculpt the images,” Seymour said. “If you’re a good editor, you don’t go too far these days.”
Aug
1
2011
THE battle about climate science is, at its heart, a battle about science itself. Climate science represents the material world in abstract form. It turns the everyday experience of weather and other phenomena into a language that speaks beyond a particular place or thing. Think of global average temperature - built of myriad data readings drawn from direct and indirect sources going back centuries - or of sea level rise. They are abstract constructions that contribute to another, larger picture of reality.
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Sheila Jasanoff, historian of science and technology, has observed that science represents rather than mirrors reality. The work of science ''tends to erase specificity and remove traces of the human mind and hand: all the moorings that tie scientific claims to local, subjective and contingent circumstances are cut loose so that claims may float freely and persuade people as objective facts … scientific facts arise out of detached observation whereas meaning emerges from embedded experience''.
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climate science is uncertain: it is out of the clouds of data and the millions of hours of observations that we begin to see, imperfectly, the shape of things around us.
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Jun
22
2011
"An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country." - Henry Wotton, Sr.
Successful career diplomats... seem to be able to both send and receive with a level of precision and detail not found in normal discussion...
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Diplomats will use the precise word in their interventions that conveys the meaning that was intended. They will differentiate between words such as would, will, could, or should. They will say persuade or dissuade as appropriate. When they write a reporting cable, they will report if the intervention they listened to indicated the speaker indicated his or her nation would oppose, object, or be disappointed, as each of these would be taken differently (oppose means they would work to block it; object means they would not like it but would reserve any commitment in terms of action; and be disappointed means they do not like it, but they would accept it without blocking it).
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In some cases, subtle shifts of policy or concessions within negotiations are signaled by the change of language from one meeting to the next. In the case of the UN General Assembly, with its annual debate of topics, this means that the listener must know that last year a nation indicated it would oppose a proposal whereas this year it would only object.
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Writing on Facebook, playwright and poet Alfian Sa’at said of the gay-affirmative event Pink Dot, “like so many things in Singapore, [it] has ended up reproducing the power structures that it should aim to challenge.” He was referring to the way Pink Dot has written all over it the social ascendancy of the English-speaking ethnic-Chinese middle class.
He reported a comment from a friend: “Pink Dot is as much a celebration of the LGBT community to love as it is a display of the self-love of Chinese, middle-class, English-educated liberals. What is inclusive in the term ‘LGBT’ is problematised by the fact that what is supposed to stand for the queer community in Singapore is almost exclusively ‘CMEL’!”
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Alfian’s critique may well be spot on. But the implicit assumption behind such a view — that any social movement aimed at objective A must first satisfy the nose test for objective B — is highly problematic. Does one expect an animal rights group to satisfy class-equality standards among all its members, volunteers and supporters? Does one demand that an anti-abortion campaign lean over backwards to ensure gender equality?
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He is not demanding that Pink Dot should be different, at least not in so many words. As he has written, “I don’t deny or dismiss how meaningful [Pink Dot] might be to some people. It’s just that it has a different meaning for me,” and that was why he chose not to attend this year. Nor was he stopping others from attending either.
Nuanced differently is another criticism of his — that Pink Dot “comes across as anxious to colonise and co-opt all the streams that exist out there.”
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Jun
19
2011
I find that the official news agencies in or of Singapore always portray religion, particularly Christianity, in the negative especially when it concerns government-related or public matters.
May
10
2011
An Orthodox Jewish newspaper has apologised for digitally deleting an image of US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, from a photograph of Barack Obama and his staff monitoring the raid by navy Seals that killed Osama bin Laden.
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Brooklyn weekly Di Tzeitung, which says it does not publish images of women, printed the doctored image last Friday. It issued a statement saying its photo editor had not read the "fine print" accompanying the White House photograph that forbade any changes. The newspaper said it has sent its "regrets and apologies" to the White House and the US department of state.
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Di Tzeitung said it has a "long standing editorial policy" of not publishing women's images. It explained that its readers "believe that women should be appreciated for who they are and what they do, not for what they look like, and the Jewish laws of modesty are an expression of respect for women, not the opposite".
May
7
2011
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Liu starts out by writing: “It's a well-trod truism of folk science that you can’t prove a negative. But can you build a popular movement — or at least a well-received dinner party — around one?”Well, it may be a truism of folk science, but it is wrong. There are plenty of situations where proving a negative is very easy. Not only both logic and mathematics abound with proof of the impossibility of X (where X can be a conjecture, theorem or whatever), but there is a number of empirical negatives that are also easily provable. For instance, if I claim that I do not have a million dollars in my bank account, it is child's play to verify my (negative) statement in a matter of minutes.
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Contra Liu, the skeptical movement isn’t built around proving negatives. It is built around the positive value of critical thinking (which you would think journalists would make their own), and the simple Humean idea that “a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”
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I often highlight situations where the science of disasters and climate change is misrepresented. Here is a case of the opposite situation. Today's Financial Times gets the science of disasters and climate change exactly right:
Apr
29
2011
After yours truly published a grainy photo of the huge crowd at the Workers’ Party rally in Hougang in the general election of 2006, it was no longer possible for the Straits Times to suppress such wide-angle pictures (even though it took several days before the newspaper published its own picture of the same rally). Prior to that, media analysts had noted that the newspaper only printed narrow-angle pictures of rally speakers or tiny sections of the crowd (i.e. 5 – 10 faces cheering). The Straits Times would not convey to the public pictorially the overall crowd sizes or enthusiasm that attended opposition party rallies.
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n the present era with the ubiquitous cellphone camera and rapid distribution channels that are well beyond blogs, such as twittering and Facebook, the old editorial policy is no longer viable. Even Straits Times’ journalists have said as much. If the newspaper does not publish such pictures, others will, and its credibility can only suffer.
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Here is the front page for Friday 29 April 2011:
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Apr
18
2011
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Did any of you notice, by the way, how the ‘world’ was defined in this UBS study? Did anybody notice any Central Asian city in the statistics? We had three token “Middle Eastern” cities from the Islamic world – Dubai, Doha and Istanbul. The former two are Gulf cities, and we all know how representative the Gulf cities are of the entire Middle East. The latter is one foot in Europe. Also, how many African cities were featured in this study? What? Only Johannesburg, Cairo and Nairobi? Africa accounts for 15% of world population, and Europe accounts for 11%. I am sure you can do the math on proportionality of representation in this UBS study.
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I apologise for this long overdue article to highlight the erroneous insinuations by my fellow KRC writer’s post, UBS: Singapore has Third World Living Standards.
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The Satay Club post’s title was “UBS: Singapore has Russian Standard of Living”. The Original UBS report was even less suggestive, and in fact hardly made any value judgment at all. The original UBS report just presented a whole list of statistics, according to whichever esoteric mathematical calculation they used
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Apr
10
2011
A lot of experiments comparing religious and non-religious people go something like this: give the study subjects an imaginary scenario, ask them some questions about how they would react, and then ask them about their religious beliefs.
All well and good, except that it's well known that we are not terribly good judges of our own behaviour. Most of us look at our own deeds through rose-tinted glasses - we tend to think that we're kinder, more trustworthy, more intelligent and braver than we actually are.
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Just how far divorced from reality we are was shown recently in an elegant study by Oriel Feldmanhall, a PhD candidate at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University, England. She's just presented the research at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco, California.
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she studied two groups of people. The first group she asked them to imagine a scenario where they would get paid a small sum to deliver painful but harmless electric shocks. 64% said they would never deliver a shock, and on average the participants would only deliver enough shocks to earn a paltry £4.
The second group got the real deal. They actually administered the shocks, and saw the response on video (they were in an MRI scanner at the time). This time, a massive 96% of participants administered shocks. Those who saw video of the grimacing faces of their victims pocketed £11.55. Those who were spared that and only saw the hands walked away with a cool £15.77. - 2 more annotation(s)...
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