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Bill Fulkerson

Burning embers: towards more transparent and robust climate-change risk assessments - 0 views

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    In this Review, we outline the history and evolution of the burning embers and associated reasons for concern framework, focusing on the methodological approaches and advances. While the assessment framework and figure design have been broadly retained over time, refinements in methodology have occurred, including the consideration of different risks, use of confidence statements, more formalized protocols and standardized metrics. Comparison across reports reveals that the risk level at a given temperature has generally increased with each assessment cycle, reflecting accumulating scientific evidence. For future assessments, an explicit, transparent and systematic process of expert elicitation is needed to enhance comparability, quality and credibility of burning embers.
Steve Bosserman

A radio play about radio that became the first fake-news story | Aeon Essays - 0 views

  • The broadcast has become an origin story of fake news and technological anxiety in the United States, and its tentacled aliens watch when we talk of fake news today. Then, as now, the worry over whether the news can be believed was a proxy for something else entirely – fear of the new technologies that brought it. Scholars have convincingly questioned the scale of the 1938 panic. Everybody loves a good story – especially the newspapers threatened by radio news, the social scientists seeking a claim to relevance, and Welles, great ham that he was. Firsthand accounts attest that some listeners did panic, but many more did not. Why, then, did millions more find the panic so easy to believe these past 80 years?
  • In that decade, radio became more trusted than newspapers. The reasons had to do partially with the unique characteristics of the medium – its intimacy and ability to put you on the spot to hear as an event unfolded without a reporting gap in which craven newspapermen could insert their own slant. It also had to do with the trueness of the sounds that radio reproduced.
  • In November, three days after the War of the Worlds broadcast, Dorothy Thompson, a syndicated columnist and radio reporter, published an oft-cited piece in response, entitled ‘Mr Welles and Mass Delusion’, in which she argued that the broadcast suggested American susceptibility to foreign propaganda:All unwittingly Mr Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time. They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can so convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create nationwide panic … If people can be frightened out of their wits by mythical men from Mars, they can be frightened into fanaticism by the fears of Reds, or convinced that America is in the hands of 60 families, or aroused to revenge against any minority, or terrorised into subservience to leadership because of any imaginable menace.
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  • The new trajectory changed news from an informative tool to an expressive one, and upended older reader-to-journalist relationships that looked almost more like a student-to-teacher relationship, albeit one entered into by choice. Though readers could always share stories, social media propelled the act. Readers can share stories because they feel true, and lend those stories emotional rather than factual force.
  • There are plenty of reasons the fake news concern of today does not exactly parallel the War of the Worlds story– among them, the fact that a large part of the modern worry is the degree to which lone actors can create the illusion of legitimacy online. But as with War of the Worlds, any individual piece of fake news – like the false story that Pope Francis endorsed President Trump – is not the only concern.More than the news, we fear the technology that transmits it. The quintessential Martians are those ways of knowing that are enabled by our new machines, threatening to make the solid world make-believe once more.
Steve Bosserman

Refugees a Burden? Trump Says Yes; Research Says Otherwise - 0 views

  • At least a dozen local, regional, and global analyses published in the last five years provide credible evidence that refugees and migrants offer long-term economic benefits for their new communities. J. Edward Taylor, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis, and director of the Rural Economies of the Americas and Pacific Rim Program, led two such studies, from Rwanda and Uganda, finding that every dollar spent by governments and organizations on refugee aid is multiplied as added income.
  • This “spillover,” as economists call it, accrues when refugees buy goods and services from local vendors and producers. In Rwanda, each additional refugee resulted in an added $205 to $253 to the economy each year. In Uganda, each refugee dollar spent generated an additional $1 to $1.50 in local income. Spillover benefits are higher when refugees receive cash transfers instead of food aid. In fact, the World Food Program promotes a program doing just this in part because it also allows refugees to make their own market choices.
  • But the overall finding offered a powerful message, Parsons said: “It implies that we have nothing to fear from accepting refugees, as long as appropriate mechanisms and support programs are in place to help people resettle and integrate.”
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