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Al Gore Speaks to 6,000 Earth Scientists in San Francisco
By Sarah Hoffman (about the author) Page 1 of 5 page(s)
For OpEdNews: S. E. Hoffman - Writer
The American Geophysical Union, commonly known as the AGU, is the world's largest organization of scientists, with over 43,000 members in more than 130 countries, and the annual meetings regularly attract thirty percent of those members.
For the past three years, I have been covering the annual AGU meeting as a freelance journalist. Although publications such as National Geographic and Science News regularly send correspondents to cover the meeting, a surprisingly low number of science articles are published in the "main stream media." Each year there will be a few stories that attract the wire services and editors of newspapers -- this year, for example, one was the first results from the Stardust spacecraft, which returned samples of cometary material to Earth. Although AP wire service articles from the AGU meeting are often published by newspapers around the country, very rarely are these stories covered by television news. Sadly, even when there is a major event linking the AGU community with the broader body politic, major media outlets most often ignore it.
On Thursday, December 14, 2006, former vice president Al Gore spoke to over 6000 earth scientists from around the world. Very few Americans heard about the speech, and those who did received only a very narrow description of it.
Over 13,000 scientists attended the 2006 conference, and about 6,000 managed to squeeze in to hear Mr. Gore, but an overflow crowd of at least one thousand was turned away . Only registered conference attendees and about 100 members of the press were permitted to enter the ballrooms at the San Francisco Marriott Hotel. There were 3500 seats in the largest ballroom, all of which were occupied. Standees were not permitted in that space, but over 2500 scientists watched the speech on giant video screens in a smaller ballroom that seated 1500 and was packed with attendees standing shoulder to shoulder. Hundreds of others stood in the hallways to listen. Thus, well over half of these scientists from all over the world either heard the speech or tried to hear it. (My attendance numbers were obtained by questioning hotel management on the number of chairs they set up and how many were turned away.)
AGU scientists are the leaders in research on climate change, climate history, oceanography, atmospheric science, geology, geophysics, and ecological sciences, as well as space sciences such as aeronomy, planetology, and solar dynamics. These annual meetings have been the principal means by which researchers on global climate change have engaged one another as well as being the predominant public forum for scientists to present their data on the developing changes in the Earth's climate.
Having attended these meetings for over 25 years, as both a scientist and a journalist, I have witnessed a profound change in the tone and language of the conference, as earth scientists have become increasingly anxious, particularly over the past ten years.
As their research has documented the evidence for large changes in the Earth's climate and the increasing likelihood of catastrophic global warming, the community of scientists has become more vocal about the looming dangers. However, the lack of a U.S. program for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and the world's reliance on fossil fuels has led to a profound sense of panic among them, and there is deep respect for the former vice president as one of the few American politicians to have taken the climate crisis seriously.
Recent annual meetings have been notable for their presentations from such scientists as Dr. Lonnie Thompson, whose studies of mountain glaciers around the world have been documenting the warming trend for several decades, and Dr. Paul Mayewski, whose studies of the Greenland ice core record have documented the comparative rapidity and danger of recent warming trends. Among AGU scientists, the lack of action on the threat of global warming has caused unprecedented alarm and civic mobilization. One would think that a speech by the former vice president to such a group would have been one of the top news stories of that week.
Sadly, it wasn't.
If you were a reader of the New York Times, or even the Los Angeles Times, you wouldn't have heard about it from your newspaper. And no national television networks covered it on their evening news programs, where most Americans get their news.
Gore's speech was a thoughtful, penetrating social critique of the way contemporary humans receive and process information, and what this signifies for the survival of civilization. However, in an online search for news items one week and again one month after the speech, this reporter found only sparse coverage, mainly from local Northern California news outlets, many of which send reporters to the AGU's San Francisco meeting each year. The San Francisco Chronicle sent a reporter, but the San Francisco Examiner, now a sad tabloid shadow of its former self, simply picked up Alicia Chang's AP story, which was a short and incomplete synopsis. Chang's story, the only source of coverage for the speech for hundreds of U.S. newspapers, ignored its core content to emphasize the obvious -- Gore's "call to scientists" at the end of his speech. Sadly, AP's reporter on the scene seems of have missed about 75% of what Gore said.
In the pressroom following the speech, as journalists talked with each other and with their editors on the telephone, I was both amazed and dismayed by the way they fastened only on the "call to action" and completely missed the meat of Gore's speech, which was an erudite, perceptive, and probing cultural critique of modern communications and their effect on the polity.
The lone exceptions were Megha Satyanarayana, writing for the Santa Cruz (CA) Sentinel, which published a serious and lengthy article [link], and Julie Sevrens Lyons, writing for the San Jose Mercury News [link], now posted online at RedOrbit.com [link]. The Mercury News also published a piece by Sevrens Lyons about Gore's self-deprecating humor at the beginning of his speech [link], perhaps because his manner and words were so at odds with the way the media has portrayed him the past.
Not surprisingly, television in the U.S. also mostly ignored the speech. Canadian television (CTV) picked up the AP story [link], but only three other American television outlets, including KRON-TV (NBC affiliate in San Francisco), were found via the Google and Yahoo search engines. MSNBC.com posted an excerpt from the AP article online [link], but the failure of other national media outlets to even mention the speech on December 14th, let alone give it significant placing or space, shows in microcosm the very media world that Gore criticized and which now threatens the future of every living being on the planet.
http://www.sarahhoffman.net
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