ECOLOGY

TV MANAGER BANS NEWS OF GLOBAL WARMING UNTIL COAST TOWN IS UNDER WATER

JOSEPH B. TREASTER, NY TIMES, ME - Michael Palmer, the general manager
of television stations WVII and WFVX, ABC and Fox affiliates in Bangor,
has told his joint staff of nine men and women that when "Bar Harbor is
underwater, then we can do global warming stories. . . "Until then," he
added. "No more."

Mr. Palmer laid out his policy in an e-mail message sent out during the
summer. A copy was sent to The New York Times. Mr. Palmer did not
respond to a phone message left with an employee of the stations nor to
an e-mail message. But a former staff member confirmed the e-mail
message that went out during the summer after the stations broadcast a
live report from a movie theater in Maine where Al Gore's movie on
global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," was opening.

Mr. Palmer began his e-mail message: "I was wondering where we should
send the bill for the live shot Friday at the theater for the Al Gore
commercial we aired."

Mr. Palmer said he wanted no more stories broadcast on global warming
because: "a) we do local news, b) the issue evolved from hard science
into hard politics and c) despite what you may have heard from the
mainstream media, this science is far from conclusive." Mr. Palmer said
in his e-mail message to his operations manager and two women who served
as a news anchor and a reporter that he placed "global warming stories
in the same category as 'the killer African bee scare' from the 1970s
or, more recently, the Y2K scare when everyone's computer was going to
self-destruct."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/business/media/30warming.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


Drastic Action on Climate Change Is Needed Now
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/103106EA.shtml
A new report ... demonstrate[s] what many of us suspected: that it would cost
much less to prevent runaway climate change than to seek to live with it. Useful
as this finding is, I hope it doesn't mean that the debate will now concentrate
on money. The principal costs of climate change will be measured in lives, not
pounds. As Stern reminded us yesterday, there would be a moral imperative to
seek to prevent mass death even if the economic case did not stack up.


The Day That Changed the Climate
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/103106EB.shtml
Climate change has been made the world's biggest priority, with the publication
of a stark report showing that the planet faces catastrophe unless urgent
measures are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.