Naomi Klein Interview Notes for Knowledge Carnival

At one point in Naomi Klein's interview, she describes a news story in which an airplane ended up stuck on the tarmac in Washington D.C. during record breaking heat. She points out that no reports mentioned anything about global warming or how emissions from airplanes could've possibly led to the tarmac melting. For the Knowledge Carnival on Monday, I plan to include a point in my group's presentation in which this is one example of how journalists could deliberately omit vital information from news reports in an attempt to entice more viewers to discuss these situations and watch future telecasts of news programs in order to receive more information about those reports.

More to come... =3

Media Censorship

The advantage of having the First Amendment here in the United States is that we have the ability to know what is actually happening within our nation and across the globe, and the freedom to provide our say on these issues without restriction. Other nations, such as Iran, Eritrea, Cuba, and China, do not have such liberties, however. In Ukraine, for example, censorship of mass media and denial of human rights were a problem throughout the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, when beforehand, as a former Soviet nation, it was very little of a problem.* The nation even went so far as to arrest and physically abuse journalists for criticizing the government. Those acts of censorship violate the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Rights.
Even with the First Amendment in use, there have also been some questionable cases of media censorship in the United States. As stated by James Turnage of Guardian Liberty Voice**, there are two reasons why news agencies fail to report the truth in their news reports throughout the country. One is that major news agencies depend upon government sources for exclusivity in reporting. There is an agreement between the two sides that information not approved by the government will be publicized, so nothing happens until an actual scandal breaks. The other and most obvious reason is money. Sensational stories sell more advertising than mundane everyday occurrences; stories about young higher-class Caucasians going missing or dying in tragedies gather more attention than similar stories involving poorer children of color; and deaths, arrests, and terminally ill diagnoses of celebrities or other famous people attain widespread news coverage, when such horrible events happen to all other people to little regard. Turnage goes on to say that the news should go back to providing the facts on issues instead of relying on false information and letting the public speak up about what they believe.

* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/valerie-hsieh/theres-something-wrong-in_b_5493917.html
** http://guardianlv.com/2013/09/censorship-in-the-major-media/

3 interesting topics in Parts I and II

1. How the fast food industry has led to the destruction of South and Central American rainforests (pgs 46-47). "According to a 1996 report by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, funded by the World Bank and the United Nations, 72 acres of rainforest are destroyed every minute, mostly by impoverished people working for multinational corporations, who are cutting and burning the forest to create agricultural or pasturelands to grow beef for export to the United States."
2. Global warming caused by the increasing emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and how "the sky is actually falling" (pgs 66-70). "...as Bill McKibben points out so articulately in The End of Nature, the distance between the ground (at sea level) and the upper edge of the troposphere, the part of our atmosphere that supports almost all life on Earth, is only about six miles. That's all that we have above and around us, just those narrow six iles of air, and crowded in and below that is every form of terrestrial life."
3. Contrasting tribes and city-states (pgs 194-200). "About seven thousand years ago, the first politically organized city-states came into being. Since that time, they have systematically exterminated almost all remnants of the tribal cultures they come in contact with. This process of extermination is now nearly complete; this century has seen the extermination of more tribal people than any in history. . . now, however, we're beginning to see the flaws in a city-state organization."

Topics to research

1. The impact of deforesting around the world
2. Control of the water industry
3. Early human civilization (e.g. Mesopotamia)

Michael Mann's TEDx Talk on Climate Change

 
In this TEDx Talk, Michael E. Mann talked about the ongoing and future scenarios regarding climate change, our lack of actions to deal with the problem, and how politics might have manipulated our views on the subject.
He first discusses about the slow but steady change in climate trends over the past millennium, and how natural and human factors would affect our predicted climate trends. Mann states that if we followed the opinions of critics who believe that climate changes were partly or entirely due to natural factors, then the globe should have cooled in recent decades, contrary to the average annual global temperatures that were actually observed; and only by including those human factors would we have our prediction of the earth warming up, on par with the observed temperatures.
He then gives more than one reason why little to no action has been made to deal with climate change: because major players who profit greatly to our current addiction to fossil fuels and they don't want to see things change in that regard, and also, some might consider man-made global warming to be nothing more than an elaborate hoax (as stated by Senator James Inhofe, (R) Oklahoma).
Mann also provides some information about the "hockey stick graph", the reconstruction in which he introduced into the field of climatology, and which also got some flack by politicians who deny the reality of human-caused climate change. It shows the variation in average annual temperature over the past millennium or so; the graph remains steady up to the 1800s, and then jets up past that point, thus giving the graph its "hockey stick" moniker.
Mann also states that we've been subject to a politization of science. He prefers to call it the "scientization of politics", which he defines as the use of attacks against science and scientists in an effort to advance a political agenda. As an example, he provides detail about the "climategate" scandal in 2009, in which criminals broke into a UK university server and stole thousands of emails between scientists, and publicized selected emails to make it sound like scientists were manipulating climate data and showing that global warming was just a scientific conspiracy.
Mann ultimately concludes his presentation by saying that climate change is a problem with ethics, not with politics or economics; the choices we make today determine our children and grandchildren's futures, and there's still time to make the right choices.