Sky News on our (absurdly hopeful) 2° Future

Just in time for the talks in Paris* and as the last hopes of our keeping temperature-increase under 2 degrees Celsius evaporate, here's a nice video from Sky News illustrating what, at this point, our most optimistic future might look like due to our greedy shortsighted stupidity.

This video, released in the last 24 hours or so, on our 2° future was accompanied by scarier videos illustrating 3° & 4° respectively.  For some reason, Sky has since chosen to set the accompanying videos to 'Private' status on YouTube.

To be generous to Sky, maybe these videos were just released prematurely by accident, and will be re-released shortly.  Maybe.**

The remaining video is instructive.****  But we're missing the progression that the video-makers clearly intended with just the one.  Also, each video ended with an encouragement to share said content via social media.  Kinda hard to do that Sky when you disappear the videos with no warning, and no explanation.



* Which due to our ever currently convenient obsession with 'The War on Terror'*** are to occur under a 'State of Emergency' with protests conveniently banned.

** That, or representatives of Murdoch's buddies in the fossil-fuel-industries got wind of what one of his media-outlets was putting out, and convinced Sky of the benefits of a little self-censorship ?

*** Many of the roots of which can be directly tied back to our dependence upon fossil-fuels, and support of the backwards regimes who control much of the supply thereof.

**** Myself, I think there's an argument that some of the millennials and younger may have an excuse (living under Western corporate media & the likes of GOP-compromised educational systems) for not understanding just how dire the threat is.  But, really, if you're over thirty or so and need any further convincing, then at this point I can't put it down to any better than, at most generous, wilful ignorance.


Update: This vid. on 5° change may be a replacement for the other two videos I mentioned.

Toles on National Geographic under Murdoch

History Repeating

Hmm, this from the Guardian piece on Thatcher's deal with Rupert Murdoch back in the eighties seems familiar.

Times Newspapers had long cherished their independence. In 1966, when the Times was in financial difficulty, the new owner who came to the rescue, Lord Roy Thomson of Fleet, promised to sustain it as an independent non-partisan newspaper – precisely how he had conducted the profitable Sunday Times. Murdoch was able to acquire both publications in 1981 only because he began making solemn pledges that he would maintain the tradition of independence. He broke every one of those promises in the first years.

Almost feels as if there were something in much more recent history along...oh, yeah...

Most readers just write a letter to the editor. Murdoch made a $5 billion offer to buy the Journal's parent company, Dow Jones. To do that, he must first win over the Bancroft family, which has controlled Dow Jones for the last 92 years and has so far resisted all of his overtures, in part because of concerns about what he might do to the Journal.

He insists he will not meddle in the journalism or slash-and-burn the staff. "We're not coming in with a bunch of cost-cutters," he said, but added: "I'm not saying it's going to be a holiday camp for everybody."

Of course he wouldn't.  On the one hand, you've got his entire history, and his use of just about every property he ever owned for partisan political purposes, and then you've got the word of...Rupert Murdoch.

Now if only someone could encourage Rupert to put Fox News behind a paywall too...

That Ole' Grauniad

I get The Times. I get The Daily Telegraph. I get the Daily Mail. I pretty much ignore The Independent, and the like, if only because they bore me to tears. And then...there's always...The Guardian. That bastion of privileged left-leaning mostly upper middle-class liberal guilt. I read it, I've read it for years, and yet somehow I've never liked it it, never identified with it. And to this date, I'm not sure who reads it, or what their business-model is. If Murdoch hadn't put The Times behind a paywall, I'm not sure that I'd bother much with The Guardian at all. It's almost like they're constantly competing to shorten the distance between the right-wing portrayals thereof as trendy lefty politically-correct bullshit and reality. If there were a meaningful alternative in the slightly-left-of-centre UK media to the Grauniad crowd, I wouldn't waste another second on their site. Sadly...there ain't.  And thus I keep reading, and on some level supporting shit like this.

The evil evil licence-fee didn't pay for this crap, but something did.  And this kinda garbage won't occasion anywhere near the outrage that the average project of the (nominally-)public broadcaster would.  In what kinda fuckin' world do we live ?

Interesting Genetic Research and Utterly Inept Journalism

Saw various articles about the genetic study of Britons in the past two days, and while the data is interesting (clusters of very similar genetic profiles, Anglo-Saxon DNA dominant in England, hardly any Viking or Roman influence), noticed that almost every article managed to misrepresent the findings on at least one fundamental level.  Here's the Telegraph's headline:

Wow, that seems surprising, huh ?  Assuming, you don't take a literal reading of the headline, which would, in that case, seem to be utter obviously on-its-face horseshit.  So, okay...okay, not literally living in Anglo-Saxon tribal kingdoms, but...

Britons are still living in the same 'tribes' that they did in the 7th Century, Oxford University has found after an astonishing study into our genetic make-up.

Archaeologists and geneticists were amazed to find that genetically similar individuals inhabit the same areas they did following the Anglo-Saxon invasion, following the fall of the Roman Empire.

In fact, a map showing tribes of Britain in 600AD is almost identical to a new chart showing genetic variability throughout the UK, suggesting that local communities have stayed put for the past 1415 years.

Okay, first sentence is still suggesting the same horseshit.  Latter sentences seem to clarify.  Especially as '600AD' plus '1415 years' would bring us exactly up to the present day.  Still, seems pretty shocking that populations in the United Kingdom in the Twenty-First Century would bear such a close resemblance to those of one and a half millennia earlier, given especially all the migrations of the past century.  One might expect for example that there would be a greater Jewish presence after the Holocaust, a greater percentage of Caribbean, African, and Middle-Eastern populations from the end of empire, a reflection of the Italian presence post-war in Scotland, and some reflection of the in-migration from the eras of the European Community and European Union.  So, what might explain this seeming discrepancy, huh ?

The ‘People of the British Isles’ study analysed the DNA of 2,039 people from rural areas of the UK, whose four grandparents were all born within 80km of each other.

Because a quarter of our genome comes from each of our grandparents, the researchers were effectively sampling DNA from these ancestors, allowing a snapshot of UK genetics in the late 19th Century before mass migration events caused by the industrial revolution.

They then analysed DNA differences at over 500,000 positions within the genome and plotted each person onto a map of the British Isles, using the centre point of their grandparents’ birth places, they were able to see how this distribution correlated with their genetic groupings.

Quoted from the same fucking article.  So the researchers analysed the DNA of a very selective population of white people in isolated rural populations for the explicit purpose of determining the genetic makeup not of modern-day Britain at all, but that of a century or more before now.

Here's the Guardian headline on the same story for comparison:

A little better...

Since that asshole Rupert Murdoch put his best publication (by far), The Times, behind a paywall, as with The Sun & The Wall Street Rag, I can't easily assess the content of their coverage of this very important subject.  But I can access the headline at least, and...

I just...WTF ?  Is that picture from the latest series of Game of Thrones, or...Oh, is it that shitty series by the so-called 'History' Channel ?  It's that, isn't it ?  This is the picture you chose...and the headline you chose...for covering serious scientific research.

I just give up.