Maybe the hooters will swamp the comment box at the St. Louis Beacon with the usual chorus of contrarian talking points on global warming. But for the town’s on line, new media, non profit outpost freelancer David Baugher managed to both miss an angle, perhaps deliberately, and provide a solid and unvarnished news account of a speech on climate given in notable circumstances.
It was Monday night at the St. Louis Science Center. The monster blizzard with its freezing Arctic winds that has since walloped the Midwest and is now heading east was setting in. National Academies President Ralph Cicerone, a steadily reliable man when it comes to making speeches in public and spreading his NAS glitter about, was at the dais to talk of climate change and the scientific confidence it is very real and not at all trivial. All Baugher writes on the context of the talk is that although “the live audience may have been sparce [sic] because of the weather (more than 300 RSVP’d), it was broadcast on HEC-TV and relayed live to 24 other science centers.”
Most reporters would have jumped on the irony of a global warming talk from a top-drawer expert on climate that is delivered as a sub-zero storm roared in and kept the crowd at home. And that’s sub-zero Fahrenheit, in Missouri. It’s a somewhat cheap shot to do so, mildly reminiscent of the igloo Senator Imhoff’s family built for Al Gore a year or so ago, but hard to resist. Resist Baugher does.
The story reads as a sensible summation of Cicerone’s remarks and of his worry that the public is not sufficiently interested in hearing such things to listen up when experts talk about them.
I am checking with NAS’s news dept. to see if Ralph C, one of the truly standup and nice guys in science, got blizzarded in by the sideways snow and may even still be there watching the arch get covered in ice. I do not resist such ironies, yet also aim to avoid using them as polemical bludgeons. So far the NAS news office says it does not know where the boss is.
– Charlie Petit
Leave a Reply