China continues to awaken. This is the video you’ve heard about – with subtitles.
UPDATE: The New York Times reports that access to the video has now been blocked by Chinese Authorities.
“Under the Dome,” a searing documentary about China’s catastrophic air pollution, had hundreds of millions of views on Chinese websites within days of its release one week ago.
The country’s new environment minister compared it to “Silent Spring,” the landmark 1962 book that energized the environmental movement in the United States. Domestic and foreign journalists clamored to interview the filmmaker, a famous former television reporter, though she remained silent.
Then on Friday afternoon, the momentum over the video came to an abrupt halt, as major Chinese video websites deleted it under orders from the Communist Party’s central propaganda department.
The startling phenomenon of the video, the national debate it set off and the official attempts to quash it reflect the deep political sensitivities in the struggle within the Chinese bureaucracy to reverse China’s environmental degradation, among the worst in the world. The drama over the video has ignited speculation over which political groups were its supporters and which sought to kill it, and whether party leaders will tolerate the civic conversation and grass-roots activism that in other countries have been necessary to curbing rampant pollution.
“It’s been spirited away by gremlins,” said Zhan Jiang, a professor of journalism and media studies in Beijing.
For the past few days, the online community in China has been abuzz over a 104-minute documentary, Under the Dome, that has galvanised the population and even major investment banks who believe it may just tip the balance against fossil fuels in the world’s biggest polluter.
Under the Dome, a documentary on air pollution produced by Chai Jing, a former CCTV investigative journalist who had already reached celebrity status in China, has been viewed more than 200 million times in its first four days of release.
It has been widely applauded in the online community, and, most pointedly, drew praise from Chen Jining, the newly appointed Environmental Protection Minister, who thanked the film maker for bringing public attention to China’s chronic pollution issues.
Already, its potential impact is being compared – by investment banking giant Merrill Lynch – to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and Rachel Carson’s A Silent Spring for its potential impact on the coal industry. Because of its endorsement by the Chinese government, Under the Dome could be even more powerful.
Indeed, Merrill Lynch said in a note to clients that the film’s impact could spell bad news for coal miners, coal generators, and oil refiners, and it could also cause ripple effects through the Chinese debt markets, even to the point where the Chinese currency might have to be devalued.
China will boost efforts this year to rid itself of a strong addiction to coal in a bid to reduce damaging pollution as well as cut the energy intensity of its economy, which is expected to grow at its lowest rate in 25 years.
MOSCOW, March 2. The outgoing winter, which ended a couple of days ago according to the calendar, has proved the warmest in the history of weather monitoring in Russia conducted since 1891, the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring said on Monday.
Over the past winter the average air temperatures in almost all Russian regions were two degrees above the norm as a minimum; on some territories it was even warmer. The past winter proved particularly mild in the Central, Northwest, Siberian and the Far Eastern Federal Districts, where seasonal air temperatures were 4-7 degrees above the norm.
The 2014-2015 winter beat a record earlier set by the 1962 winter by 0.5 degrees. The past winter was one of the four warmest winters in Moscow’s history, ranking fourth after almost equally warm winters registered in 1961, 1989 and 2008.
The mild winter in Russia was a result of being centered in a zone of abnormal warm weather that set in on the whole territory of Eurasia, in the west of North America, starting from Alaska to Mexico, and spreading to the central Atlantic area. It was warm whirls of wind from the Atlantic area that made the past winter in Russia particularly mild.
But, the east of the United States and Canada , the northwestern area of Africa and some territories in India suffered from a spell of winter cold last year, although a gap between abnormally low and normal air temperatures on these territories was essentially lower than on the territories where the last winter was mild.
A general conclusion was that the 2014-2015 winter was the warmest in the Northern Hemisphere in the history story of weather monitoring, The average air temperatures last winter were higher than the previous” warm” record set in 2006-2007.
When a massive and mysterious hole was discovered in Siberia last July (see pictures), social media users pointed to everything from a meteorite to a stray missile to aliens to the Bermuda Triangle as possible causes. But the most plausible explanation seemed to be the explosive release of melting methane hydrate—an ice-like material frozen in the Arctic ground—thanks to global warming.
Now, scientists are arguing that the methane theory is unlikely, based on new satellite surveys released by Russian researchers that found dozens of new craters in Siberia.
Music Break: Vance Joy, Your Mess is Mine
March 8, 2015
Amory Lovins is someone that should be seen in the media a lot more than he is.
Facts are stubborn things. Truth is a slippery slope.
Just because Google tells you something, though, doesn’t mean it’s true. A team of Google researchers has devised a “Knowledge-based Trust” algorithm that attempts to rank websites based on their factual accuracy, rather than their popularity. In order to do that, however, it needs to be able to figure out what’s factual and what isn’t.
Google’s Knowledge Vault tries to find information that falls into a pattern of what Google calls “triples,” which are made up of three factors: a subject that’s a real-world entity, a predicate that describe some attribute of that entity, and an object that is the value of the attribute. For example, that President Obama (subject) is the president (predicate) of the United States (object).
The Knowledge Vault contains billions of those triples from across the web. And the Knowledge-based Trust algorithm uses a complicated multi-layer approach to weigh whether or not particular facts are true.
If the system works as well as hoped, Google might be able to rank sites based on just how factual they are, which is good for everything from fact-checking politicians to writing that research paper.
Was Obama born in Kenya? How do I know, I’m not a geographer!
The Google researchers give, as an example, websites that say President Obama was born in Kenya; such sites would be penalized in Google rankings, whereas sites that correctly say he was born in the U.S. would get a boost in rankings.
That fact is not controversial, but critics worry that this is a first step towards Google playing God and effectively censoring content it does not like. They fear that skeptics of things like climate change or more immigration (both subjects that Google founders have expressed strong feelings about) might find their websites buried if this ranking system were adopted.
“I worry about this issue greatly… My site gets a significant portion of its daily traffic from Google,” Anthony Watts, who runs Watts Up With That, a popular blog that is skeptical of global warming claims, told FoxNews.com.
“It is a very slippery and dangerous slope because there’s no arguing with a machine,” he added.
Reviews coming in – Scientific American:
Kenner employs Scientific American‘s own arch-skeptic Michael Shermer to show how this denial is not skepticism, but cynicism. Shermer details his own journey from skeptic to the ranks of the convinced, swayed by data, something Singer, Seitz and their colleagues seem immune to—perhaps helped along by the kind of funding that the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics’ Willie Soon has most recently enjoyed.
In addition to skeptical “scientists,” another useful ally has been think tanks that can sow doubt under the guise of impartiality, such as the Global Climate Coalition that fought action on climate change from 1989 to 2002 or, more recently, the Heartland Institute. I had the privilege of attending Heartland’s first skeptics conference held in New York City in 2008. That’s where I learned that polar bears are an insidious threat to the American way of life.
There I also got to interview Marc Morano, who was then the PR director for Sen. James Inhofe (R–Okla.), the leading climate denier in Congress, both then and now. Morano is a talking bobble head for cable news these days and Inhofe is once again in charge of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which makes it highly unlikely Congress will do anything about the problem of climate change. Inhofe’s most recent antics include tossing a snowball on the Senate floor.
As Morano puts it in the new film: “Gridlock is the greatest friend” for climate change deniers.
Above, some clips that didn’t make the cut in my most recent video, a review of “Merchants of Doubt”, which opens today in cities across the country.
One of the folks profiled in the movie is former Congressman Bob Inglis, a very conservative guy, who lost his seat in a very red district of South Carolina, in large part because he believes in science. I couldn’t fit it into the video, but worth watching, to see what a monster the Republican Party has created with the Fox News/Talk Radio disinformation machine. They’ve created a rabid base of low information anti-science zealots.
We will need to see some Republican Profiles in Courage to break thru this barrier. So far, not much good news on that front.
It’s been an article of faith for some time now — inside the whispery Washington Beltway, in state legislatures and even among hunting and outdoor recreation groups — that conservative Americans are, in fact, very much at odds with the vacuous climate denialism peddled by many members of the Republican Party’s national leadership.
Polls have, from time to time, hinted at this cleavage, and while a number of high-profile Republicans have begun inching away from a wholesale rejection of the issue, conservative voters remain hard-pressed to find frank and honest talk about climate policy among their political allies.
During remarks delivered at the Yale Environmental Law Association’s New Directions in Environmental Law conference last weekend, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat who has wrestled for years with his Republican counterparts on the issue of global warming, described the GOP as being somewhat at sea on the climate issue. In guarded moments, many Republicans in Congress admit that they are cognizant of the problem, Whitehouse suggested. But those same leaders remain paralyzed with fear at the idea of admitting so publicly — a move, they reckon, that could anger disbelieving right-wing voters and alienate a fossil-fuel industrial complex that keeps the GOP well-financed and on a short leash.
“You have a party that has been captured,” Whitehouse declared, adding that a significant percentage of the GOP faithful “are seeking a jailbreak.”
In stark contrast to their party’s public stance on Capitol Hill, many Republicans privately acknowledge the scientific consensus that human activity is at least partially responsible for climate change and recognize the need to address the problem.
