Realistic Hope and Paradoxical News in Global Warming
Editor's Note:
The first four Nature's Edge Notebooks in this year-long series reported some new realistic hope in the global warming crisis, this "story too big to cover - almost", and explored its basic and sometimes paradoxical nature as a news story.
At year's end, we are reposting these four Notebooks here as no less pertinent - in fact even more newsworthy, given the growing climate crisis, than when we first launched this Nature's Edge series that aims to explore and analyze the unprecedented and psychologically daunting story of manmade global warming.
(Tom And Steve/Getty Images)
1. HOW WE CHOOSE EXPERTS ON MATTERS THAT MATTER. Which experts are most credble on how sunset really happens (despite appearances), on who really wrote Shakespeare's works, and on manmade global warming.
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2. JOURNALISTIC FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH IN A 2-MINUTE VIDEO ABOUT A CUTE MOUNTAIN MAMMAL. A 2-minute video about a furry wild animal in the Rockies shows how global warming is producing news stories that become, paradoxically, ever-newer.
(ABC News)
3. SEE HOW OUR WORLD WOULD LOOK IF GREENHOUSE GASES WERE VISIBLE - AND THE "TWO INVISIBILITIES" OF GLOBAL WARMING. We look through a special infra-red camera that can "see" greenhouse gases, which are by definition invisible. (They let visible sunlight through but trap the invisible hot infra-red light that radiates back from the sun-warmed earth.) The world looks very different.
(Siegfried Layda/Getty Images)
4. GOOD NEWS ON GLOBAL WARMING: HUMANS AREN'T COMPLETE IDIOTS. REALISTIC HOPE IN "THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS" AND THE SURPRISING "ULTIMATUM GAME." Our hunt for realistic hope in the manmade global warming story turns up news about the humans causing it: the "tragedy of the commons" doesn't happen, says the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics, when the people who share the commons can talk freely among themselves. There's also realistic hope in the remarkable counter-intuitive findings of how we all play "The Ultimatum Game."