Rising sea levels aren’t a scientific threat – it’s happening outside my window
I have always reassured myself that this coast where I live has looked the same ever since I first started coming to this area as a toddler. There are individual rocks on beaches that I have forever known to watch out for when I am catching a wave, sand spits and bays that have, for decades, seemed immutable.
But if Church and his colleagues are right the coastline itself and the first law of Australian real estate – an ocean view is gold – is about to be re-written.
So nothing has changed since he was a toddler, but he can see it changing in the future because some academic told him it will.
Ah. Religious beliefs hold no bounds for some people. Even the impossible is possible. Perhaps if he lives to be 500 years old because of advances in modern medicine in Britain, he will be treated to the sight of ice bergs floating by off the coast. Maybe he will have seen the sea receding from his property since water will have been once again locked up in glaciers and snow pack. Not sure this needs a SARC.
Sand spits that seem immutable?
This guy is truly stupid, isn’t he?
He is trying to implant, into impressionable minds which know little of natural history, the fearsome idea that what they have seen as being immutable is completely mutable. He identifies with his target audience by feigning the level of ignorance that he imagines them to have. That is a standard “post-modern journalism” tactic which they go to school to learn how to do. Unsurprisingly, its use originated in political science, not journalism.
So, not nearly as stupid as he appears to be.
RTF
Eh… I’d sooner think that he believes that sand spits don’t move.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” – Robert Hanlon
There is a global conspiracy. It’s not just a couple of guys or a JV debating club. Therefore, a new rule in two parts (or a corollary of the old), which I follow and recommend to everyone who would like to survive all of this:
a. If the behavior fits the pattern perfectly, and there is a clear “mark” or “target” for the misdeed, i.e. a person or people who stand to suffer as a result, then attribute it to malice unless new, exculpatory evidence arises.
b. Only attribute to stupidity that which is not overwhelmingly attributable to malice.
RTF
Well, maybe, but this Woodford fellow sounds just like another common dunce, of whom there are plenty in my neighborhood and who are certainly not part of anything, other than their immutable shared certainty that they are intellectually and morally superior.
+1
Colorado, having had two MSM reporters in my close family, I am intimately familiar with this brand of “stupidity”. One of them was a practitioner, the other was forced out for complaining about the practice. Both of them could turn it on and off like a switch. They cultivate the skill because it’s life-and-death for them. These days, they don’t do it, they don’t get published. And in very short order after that, no paycheck.
Remember, every story in “journalism” has an angle. And the purpose of mass comm is to teach the student how to slip the reader that angle, without the average reader being wise to what it is, or even if there is one. At the same time, if they themselves can’t peg the angle in the first three paragraphs, then either there’s something “wrong” with the writer, or with the reader.
RTF
Good observations, Richard. I reckon sounding like a common dunce is part of the skill. It builds trust with the readers.
You got it. We are awash in subliminal programming today. For them, it’s just a trade skill, like cutting the joints for a pitched roof. Most of them don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on it, and it just kind of becomes part of their “quirky” personality. But they are well aware of it, because it’s a learned behavior, not something that comes naturally.
RTF
The same Pew Charitable Trusts that pays James Woodford to write about the future prediction of climate disaster as if it had already happened, also are the Pew Charitable Trusts that paid for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, which later changed its name to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES).
I wonder if that’s related somehow?!?
According to this, John Church gets all his money from government grants and works for the CSIRO:
http://theconversation.com/15-years-from-now-our-impact-on-regional-sea-level-will-be-clear-31821
Dang it! I should not have read beyond, “Guardian Writer.”
Gold
What poorly written drivel! Nothing is happening and nothing has happened for many decades, but since some money grubbing, publicity seeking “scientist” says we need to head for hills, we better start out right now.
Notice how utterly lazy they’re getting?
“Climate Change ©®™ is already impacting us today, just look out your window”.
OK then warmists, point it out to me through your famed “window”.
He is more than welcome to swap his at-risk bit of waterfront property in Eurobodalla for my very safe, far from the sea patch of land in Western Sydney. I won’t even charge him any extra.
Science it the process of Observation, modelling, making predictions from those models, and accepting those models if the predictions come true, or throwing out those models if the predictions prove false. Since the predictions of the global warming true believers have proved to be false time and again it is by scientific definition settled and the current global warming/cooling models are not valid. These people making predictions have no clue what the climate will do.
If a bunch of academics or politicians agree it is not science it is politics.
It’s Guardian Majic!
Most writers in that magical paper have mystical power of second sight déjà vu through their third eye. The others resort to employing levator ani syndrome curses to get the same effect.
“Remember, every story in “journalism” has an angle. And the purpose of mass comm is to teach the student how to slip the reader that angle, without the average reader being wise to what it is, or even if there is one.”
RTF
Thank you, Mr. Fowler.
My niece majored in journalism (but never worked in a “news” job). She has said repeatedly that the most valuable thing she learned was that most of her classmates had a political agenda to advance. They were quite open about it. Becoming a journalist was the way they were going to advance that agenda.