Swine Flu versus Tuberculosis (previous post)
Swedish news paper SvD writes “Panic reaches new heights” complaining that media is covering the swine flu excessively. The quantity, and quality, of news stuff is not determined by importance, but by time. Print it today or don’t print it at all and if other media ran the story recently, so can we. This leads to typical acceleration and deceleration. Once a story is old, fewer media will report on it and it will disappear quickly from all media. The reverse is true for new stuff; more and more will print it because more and more are printing it. And voila, everybody forgot about the fact that the US have spent enough money on weapons to kill every single human on earth.
User named tenzvideos writes on youtube:
A recent internal CDC briefing noted, “20,000 people die from novel 2009-H1N1 and everybody wants to wear a mask. 9 million people die from AIDS and no one wants to wear a condom.”
News makes people forget about the important stuff. However, the ability to make people forget is true for important news like climate change as well. Climate change has been used so often that people have forgotten about the environment. Some even think the climate is the environment. But climate change (as used today) is solely concerned with the concentrations of different gases in the atmosphere, which consists of 80 % nitrogen and 0.04 % carbon-dioxide. The carbon-dioxide near the surface keeps the surface a bit warmer than if it had not been there so it’s relevant to discuss it, but we sorta forgot that the whole point of the climate change discussion was to protect the environment.
We want biodiversity and changing ecosystems leads to species extinctions, and new species don’t evolve at the same rate as we wipe them out, meaning we’re currently lowering the biodiversity among the most complex (most multi-cellular) versions of life.
If we want life on earth to consist of only humans, rice, bacteria and virus, then this is of course not a problem.
If we want to change diverse ecosystems into mono-cultural farmland to grow bio-fuels instead of using oil, then we’ve missed the whole point.
“Very old news, but fucking important”
If we don’t grow bio-fuels maybe we’ll remember to look up at that shiny thing in the sky which is very old news, but fucking important. The sun alone would erase the oil industry from the future of human civilization, if people would only stop talking about the bloody flu and build some sun panels.
You hear that, India? I just solved the world’s biggest problem, now it’s up to you to implement it.
Update: And just having read that foreign investors want solar plants in China, just remember that when we’re talking solar power i mean extracting power from the rays of the sun – don’t create a tiny sun on earth with fusion – one huge one is enough.
enleuk 