PBS has many fine programs, occasionally “NOVA” does a decent job. But this program was a great example of the nest of vipers and banana slugs that occasionally hijack the controls.
On the Nova Broadcast 19 August on alleged Global Dimming
I should state at the outset that I have completed science courses in junior highschool, highschool, and a reasonably reputable college. Since then I have read voluminously on general science, astronomy, physics, nuclear radiation, medical and epidemiologic effects of ionizing radiation, history of science, et cetera. I am satisfied that our culture has entered a period of unprecedented misappropriation of scientific credibility for the purpose of advancing POLITICAL agendas. Unfortunately, this particular broadcast seems to be a textbook example of the problem.
This television pseudo-documentary is absolutely the most appallingly insultingly conjectural fear-mongering lying speculative crap presented as demonstrated fact.
The entire show is a congeries of portentous narration, ominous scoring, ham-handed editorial choices of powerful but ambiguous images which are meant to support the assertions of the text. The use of overcast shots of Manhattan while narrator Kathryn Walker tells us of increasing air pollution is legitimate, I suppose, but it is a lousy substitute for actual data about atmospheric changes. The narration speaks of pollution, and the video parades a series of images of cumulus clouds, without letting us know whether they are polluted or clean. NOVA has made this approach its signature: where the argument is weak, use images that suggest confirmation without actually providing any specific information.
The program starts with the assertion that one man compared data he collected in the 1950’s with those he collected in the 1980’s and saw that there was something like a 20 percent difference in the two data sets.
That is interesting, but he then makes the leap to claim that his data were sufficiently comprehensive to allow him to state unequivocally that they PROVED Israel had received 20 percent less sunlight at the surface in the 1980’s.
This is absurd. The Global Weather Experiment of 1981 was the FIRST worldwide attempt to do a methodical survey of data in an attempt to assess all the factors that drive world weather systems. Three decades later we still do not have anything approaching the amount of data-gathering instrumentation sufficient to predict weather out beyond a week ANYWHERE. (The Global Weather Experiment is something I studied carefully because I was asked by the U.S. Department of Commerce to prepare a script proposal for a documentary film on the yearlong project.) To say that ANY scientist has enough data from ten years ago – when there were even FEWER data points – to be able to make comprehensive statements about the amount of sunlight incident upon the earth’s surface then and now, can only be a grotesque misrepresentation. At best we can say some data seem to point to a trend.
The producers of the show, it must be concluded, are not interested in science; they are creating propaganda to further a blatant agenda.
Another instance is the two Australian scientists who speak of “pan evaporation data” and announce that they – Mirabile dictu! – have discovered a brand new aspect of water evaporation that no one else in the history of science had noticed, despite tens of thousands of scientists working with water and its phase changes for hundreds of years. They claim that evaporation is dependent upon the “strength” of the photons reaching the surface of the water. Imagine that! So anyone who has watched water evaporate in the shade on a hot day clearly has been hallucinating. But WAIT! Water will evaporate in the dark. Even in cold weather. Well, really all they’re saying is that MORE photons hitting the water would logically cause more evaporation, assuming the light energy is absorbed.
Still another fundamental sloppiness of the presentation is that neither the producers nor the alleged scientists make any attempt to distinguish between “visible” light and the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, and only occasionally refer to any sort of quantification of the energy, nor any systematic attempt to establish a consistent baseline for measurement against which the significance of any change could be rationally gauged.
And, sorry, folks, but the heat of the planet is determined by the total energy absorbed by the atmosphere, the ocean, and the land surface. The hystrionic doom-saying is trying to tell us that industrial pollution is simultaneously cooling the earth AND warming it. This may well be possible, but the problem is that the entire show is built on unproven speculation which is then used as the basis for further assertions, which without being proven are then used for even more conjecture and speculation. Time after time, a conjecture is stated, and the program proceeds to treat it as an undeniable fact and scare the viewers with the hideous consequences should the conjecture come true.
This is like the pseudo-science of the so-called “Bermuda Triangle” which posits some mysterious even demonic forces at work, by taking an arbitrary and extremely pliant definition of the geographic patch being considered, and looking for any unexplained phenomena that can somehow be connected to it.
NOVA used to be a respectable and useful source of actual information. It is a shame it has become such a conspicuous whore for politically-correct “consensus” science.
