~JUNK FOOD & JUNK SCIENCE~Monbiot

David Bellamy's Inaccurate and Selective Figures on Glacier Shrinkage
are a Boon to Climate Change Deniers

GEORGE MONBIOT
The Guardian (UK)
10, may2005

For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16 New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy... Many of the world's glaciers, he claimed, "not shrinking but in fact are growing ... 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980". His letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers. And it began to worry me. What if Bellamy was right?



An observer from mars would find us a pretty strange species indeed. We poison our own children's minds with advertising so we can poison their bodies with junk food, all in the name of profits for a few. Then we complain about skyrocketing costs of health care and crime, but all we can think to do are build more hospitals and prisons. Never mind actually taking seriously what we know about causes and prevention.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 2nd May 2006

Does television cause crime? The idea that people copy the violence they watch is debated endlessly by criminologists. But this column concerns an odder and perhaps more interesting notion: if crime leaps out of the box, it is not the programmes that are responsible as much as the material in between. It proposes that violence emerges from those blissful images of family life, purged of all darkness, that we see in the advertisements.

An observer from mars would find us a pretty strange species indeed. We poison our own children's minds with advertising so we can poison their bodies with junk food, all in the name of profits for a few. Then we complain about skyrocketing costs of health care and crime, but all we can think to do are build more hospitals and prisons. Never mind actually taking seriously what we know about causes and prevention.