How a Story Travels the Web

In the last week or two, online media have been giving attention to a Pentagon study on climate change as US national-security threat. The unclassified report was passed on to Fortune magazine, which ran a long story early in February. It was ignored by US media but picked up by left-wing UK papers. From there the story has returned to North America.

Now you can read a critical description of the process by Iain Murray on Pentagon Climate Report on National Review Online. Murray's counter-arguments (no SUVs 8,000 years ago during the last warming, so SUVs can't be to blame this time) are tenuous, but he does us the favour of providing a link to the original report, available as a PDF.

I'm following the story with personal interest, since I published a story about global warming way back in 1996, describing the same likelihood of global warming leading to regional cooling in northwest Europe. The facts and their implications have been around for years; but sometimes it takes a long time for those implications to sink in, even on the Web.

Comments

[bp]

based more upon the title of this post than on its content, I thought you might be interested in this article: http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,62537,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

that I found via teammurder.com. Quite honestly, I wouldn't mind hearing your thoughts about it, if you have any.