After the hurricane

Two photographs I've seen online, the first from the 30th and the 2nd from today made me want to give them some captions:

"What happens when we keep burning our way through all that petrol"

Given the above, it seems appropriate to link to a rather amazing animated sequence about what's going up above New York.

I caught a headline from on the BBC that I couldn't stop thinking of when I then saw this image.

"East Coast residents were overjoyed to hear that the NYSE had re-opened!"

And then to wrap up, two entries from the Climate Progress blog:

The most recent one is a post about Governor Cuomo of New York City who would obviously disagree with the BBC reporter I heard yesterday say that "[Sandy] ... is a once in a generation storm". But then the BBC seem under the strictest orders never to mention Climate Change as even possibly playing a part in any extreme weather event that they report.

The other is the omission of the mention of Climate Change by the mainstream media when discussing Sandy's appearance, approach, arrival and aftermath. I particularly liked this tidbit from the USA - "During this July’s extreme heat wave, only 8.7 percent of television news coverage mentioned climate change; over the summer, television news outlets covered Paul Ryan’s P90-X workouts three times more than the record loss of Arctic sea ice;". I have to add that I've no idea who Paul Ryan is ...

Now here's a TV weather slot!

I feel bad about posting yet another video rather than relating my own beautifully worded record of life here on the lovely Essex coast, but when I saw this today I knew I had to pop it on here. I love the way that the news anchor continues to keep the programme sailing on in its usual fashion. :)

I don't Tweet and I'm not on Facebook so this is really my only place to post items that pique my interest. Anyway, I'll also include the intro text from the blog entry at Climate Progress and then the video.

I don't think I need to add anything else, perhaps apart from registering my continuing disbelief that the politicians in almost all countries appear to be sleepwalking right into the biggest crisis our species will ever face. As Caroline Lucas memorably said several years ago "We could be the first species to monitor its own extinction".

Here you are:

While the increase extreme weather has boosted Americans’ attention to climate issues, it still hasn’t spurred much alarm or concrete political action. Last week, after the underwhelming reaction to record melting of Arctic sea ice, George Monbiot of theGuardian labeled it as “the day the world went mad.”

Well, what if your local weatherwoman went
mad sane and told it like it is? The mock video below shows how that might play out:

Freedom of the press

The BBC recently reported the Sun's take on its decision to print the photo of Prince Harry naked:

In Friday's Sun, under the headline "Heir it is", the paper says: "Pic of naked Harry you've already seen on the internet".

David Dinsmore, managing editor of the Sun, said the paper had thought "long and hard" about publication and added: "For us this is about the freedom of the press.

"This is about the ludicrous situation where a picture can be seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world on the internet but can't be seen in the nation's favourite paper read by eight million people every day.

"This is about our readers getting involved in the discussion with the man who is third in line to the throne - it's as simple as that."

In an editorial, the newspaper said the pictures represented a crucial test of Britain's free press.

A number of questions sprung to my mind:

• Why did the paper think "long and hard" about going to the trouble of printing a picture available to "hundreds of millions of people ... on the internet"? Surely that is a number even greater than the circulation of the Sun so presumably the Sun's buyers have already seen the photos?
• Why did the paper not simply supply a link to the internet photo or suggest a few search terms instead thus avoiding the "long and hard" thinking?
• What kind of 'discussion' does Mr Dinsmore expect to result from the publication of the photos? How would this discussion have differed if they had not printed the photos?
• His comment seems to imply that this 'discussion' will be "with the man who is third in line to the throne" - are we to understand that Prince Harry will be personally involved in this 'discussion' with the readers of the Sun?
• Why is this a crucial test of Britain's 'free press', rather than, say, a discussion about why the mainstream news media are in the hands of a very few, very rich companies who have a very particular view of what's important and what's not in the world and why, for example, we in the West are the good guys no matter what violence we do to the lives of people in other (usually Middle Eastern) countries where they are of course wicked terrorists waiting to destroy the fragile world peace we are so determined to spread around the globe?

For anyone interested in analysing the performance of our 'free press' they may like to have a look at Medialens and make up your own mind.