Shifting Baselines Blog

5/19 - Learning to Love Carbon Dioxide: more disinformation campaigning

The nerve of these folks. It's amazing. "Carbon dioxide ... they call it pollution, we call it life." That's their slogan. A major media campaign against the whole idea of global warming happening. What's going on, has everyone lost their minds? The modern environmental movement was born in the 60's and 70's. I remember those days. And I don't ever remember anyone running commercials trying to tell you scientists are all wrong and evil and working their own agenda. And who is answering these disinformation campaigns? Not the academics -- they think media is irrelevant and ineffective. The world just keeps getting stranger.

The little girl in the Environmental Defense commercial needs to slap some sense into this little girl and her sadly misguided Competitive Enterprise Institute

5/16 - Blogfish: A new blog that will answer all your fishy questions

Dr. Mark Powell, Director of Fish Conservation for the Ocean Conservancy and one of our long time SB supporters, has started BLOGFISH a blog focusing on everything you need to know about keeping fish in our oceans.

A man, a fish and a plan (and a blog)

5/13 - Killing Baja: the pristine myth strikes again

Here's a very important essay by one of our favorite ocean heroes, Serge Dedina, Executive Director of Wildcoast. He lists FIVE, count 'em, FIVE major sources of major environmental threats to Baja in the next few years: energy development, port construction, marinas and mega-resorts, the Baja land race, and coastal pollution. It doesn't sound good.

Baja for sale

5/12 - Environmental Disinformation: Does anyone really care?

This is sort of what "shifting baselines," is about. If we don't have any firm hold on what the baselines once were, then the door is wide open for disinformation campaigns. Like this one sponsored by something called the Pacific Research Institute, in San Francisco, which is yet another right wing think tank providing leadership in areas that the left wing neglects.

In this case they are happily out there sending out the message that all is well in the environment, and doing so with actual data from studies of nature. But so much of what they offer up are case studies in shifted baselines -- for example they cite a recent study of spawning stock in Chesapeake blue crabs showing a 25% increase in abundance from 2003 to 2004.

What they use to their advantage is the idea that if you don't have massive and thorough data on the decline of a species, you should go with the assumption that there's nothing wrong. Bottom line, all else equal, let's err in the direction of "no worries, mate."

It's a shame the environmental movement first off doesn't have the resources to combat these sorts of disinformation programs, and secondly, that they don't seem to understand the importance and potential impact of disinformation enough to want to address it. The perfect example of this was Michael Crichton's novel, "State of Fear," which was just chuckled at by the largest environmental group combatting global warming.

Fighting for environmental "truth" so we can all relax

5/10 - New Things Brewing for Shifting Baselines

Just got back from the Tribeca Film Festival (which was a two week sprint in which I only found time for two movies), but its time to wake things up a bit with Shifting Baselines. We'll have an announcement in the next few days of a new phase. Stay tuned!