Emphasizing The Negative

Tom Sowell writes about one of my own favorite themes: The Media’s War:

The Marines lost more than 5,000 men taking one island in the Pacific during a three-month period in World War II. In the Civil War, the Confederates lost 5,000 men in one battle in one day.

Yet there was Jim Lehrer on the “News Hour” last week earnestly asking Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the ten Americans killed that day. It is hard to imagine anybody in any previous war asking any such question of anyone responsible for fighting a war.

We have lost more men than that in our most overwhelming and one-sided victories in previous wars. During an aerial battle over the Mariannas islands in World War II, Americans shot down hundreds of Japanese planes while losing about 30 of their own.

If the media of that era had been reporting the way the media report today, all we would have heard about would have been that more than two dozen Americans were killed that day.

Positive Feedback Loop

Control engineers would call this a runaway controller.

When the response to a change is to increase the change, rather than decrease it (which is what, for example, thermostats normally do), change happens very quickly, and uncontrollably. One of the issues with global warming is whether or not the feedback is positive, or negative. That is, does the warming result in even more warming, resulting in…or do things happen at higher temperatures that result in cooling?

One potential positive feedback might be that if glaciers and ice caps melt, the albedo of the planet decreases, which means that less energy is reflected back into space, which could result in further warming. In the other direction, if we are headed into a new glacial period despite the greenhouse effects (perhaps because solar activity dominates all else), then increasing snow cover makes things colder because more solar energy is rereflected, thus causing more cooling, and an accelerating glacial advance.

On the negative feedback side, though, it could be that more warming results in more clouds, which might in turn have the effect of cooling things off.

I suspect that the reality will be a combination of positive and negative feedback mechanisms, and it’s hard to know what the overall effect will be, though ultimately, it will be negative, but perhaps at a significantly higher (or lower) temperature. I’d be very surprised if the seas end up either boiling, or freezing solid.

Desperate For Attention

One of the dozen or so people to protest Tookie Williams’ execution in Denver was Ward Churchill. Which reminds me–what’s the status of the investigation into the plagiarism and other charges against him?

Hmmmm…according to Wikipedia (for whatever that’s worth), the investigation is still ongoing.

And on the subject of the late Mr. Williams, how is that the Hollywood types are so consistent at being on the wrong side of almost every issue?

[Update a few minutes later]

Ahhh…we must have done the right thing–we’ve upset the Europeans

[Update after noon]

Iowahawk has discovered one of Tookie’s unpublished children’s stories.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!