"[M]isinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier."

This NYT piece gives me some hope that maybe 2008 is the year we'll get a serious answer to the question I posed last March about the role of Carbon Dioxide in climate change. It seemed strange then that no one could answer what seems like it'd be a fairly simple question and one foundationally important to the debate.

Anyway, here's what the NYT says (and no, this isn't Kristol's first column). Having noted several examples where the media has overhyped certain weather events and looked the other way for others depending on how well they comport with the Gorethodoxy, the paper suggests that

[t]he most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on the public.

When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. ... Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” ... a self-perpetuating process[ in which] the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. ... Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.

They also quote my bête noire, Prof. Cass Sunstein, observing that “[m]any people concerned about climate change want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people’s minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don’t doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there’s a danger that any ‘consensus’ on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.” Tully ought to like that last point, and I don't think anyone's ever called Cass Sunstein or the NYT "climate change skeptics."