Fuckin' AmazonPost.com sure is turning into a barrel-scraping shitshow. Let's check the AmazonPost from LAST MONTH about Europe's new crippling heat waves, something they've never encountered before. Then let's look at the Washington Post, prior to Bezos buying it, talking about the human impacts of global warming on temperatures in Europe. If you dig into the heat wave of 2003 you'll find estimates between 35,000 and 70,000 deaths. That's somewhere between double and quadruple the death toll from the Tohoku quake. This is a sham hitpiece assembled from two experts and a poll with no American component that has been glued together with two pointless quotes. It's not news, unless you think it's surprising that Europeans are having to suddenly wrap their heads around air conditioning because of globlal warming, or that it's surprising that socialist-leaning societies expect more government intervention in large policy decisions. "If the developing world were to use energy at the same pace as the United States the globe would go up in an incandescent cinder," said every climate scientist since the beginning of the industrial revolution.The three British authors -- Peter A. Stott of the University of Reading, and D.A. Stone and M.R. Allen of Oxford University -- used two computer models to assess the likelihood that a summer like that in 2003, which was Europe's hottest in centuries and was blamed for at least 35,000 deaths, would have occurred without human influences. They concluded, at a confidence level of more than 90 percent, that human activity doubled, if not quadrupled, the chances of "a heat wave exceeding this threshold magnitude."
"The bottom line is that America's a big, rich, hot country," Cox told The Post. "But if the second, fourth, and fifth most populous nations -- India, Indonesia, and Brazil, all hot and humid -- were to use as much energy per capita for air-conditioning as does the U.S., it would require 100 percent of those countries' electricity supplies, plus all of the electricity generated by Mexico, the U.K., Italy, and the entire continent of Africa," he added.
I have more or less stopped reading the Post. And NPR, and even the Times. When you follow them on facebook and get constant articles in your feed rather than seeking out the occasional article fit to your interests, you realize how damn stupid 90 percent of their coverage is. These days I've pretty much quit. I read whatever longreads sends me, War Nerd, New Yorker human interest pieces, and the TLS/NYmag culture stuff. Periodically the FT/WSJ money combo. I dunno why anyone still reads the Post.