eapons and a spray tank on it. Fortunately they didn’t get it working. That is the low end of the scale and some people would not call that a cruise missile, but I would."
In July 1996, the British Defense Secretary, Michael Portillo, announced that <@163>4 billion worth of defense contracts had been placed. Billions are to be spent developing Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft, a new cruise missile and an anti-tank system. For good reasons, no mention was made of just who these weapons are intended to defend Britain from; the preferred justification being that 5,000 jobs will be created.
The press went along with the farce. "A replacement for the Nimrod patrol aircraft is urgently needed because it is simply getting old," David Fairhill of The Guardian (July 27, 1996) writes. It is irrelevant, then, that Nimrod was originally developed (or so we were told) to protect us from a massed nuclear superpower Soviet attack, and not, say, Iraqi pilotless planes armed with spray tanks. <N>
@HEAD 1 = When Goblins Walk The Earth
@PAR AFTERJ<@191>UB = In considering the failure of the West to respond to the very real threat of global warming, we need to remember that Western governments, academics and media joined whole-heartedly in promoting the Soviet "threat."
By contrast, the media has responded with indifference, scepticism, and a kind of wilful amnesia to warnings relating to global warming.
A prime example was the media response to an October 1990 UN conference at which an international panel of scientists reached virtual unanimity on the conclusion that global warming had occurred over the past century and that the risk of further warming is serious, ranging from significant to near-catastrophic. Not a single member of the panel agreed with sceptical views expressed in the U.S. press, gaining such headlines as "U.S. Data Fail To Show Warming Trend" (New York Times) and "The Global Warming Panic: A Classic Case of Over-Reaction" (cover of Forbes, Science, March 8, 1990).
In contrast to the "menace of international communism," the facts of this issue represent a serious threat to corporate goals. Stephen Schneider, head of Interdisciplinary Climate Systems at the U.S. National Centre For Atmospheric Research, has estimated that conversion to a post-greenhouse economy would cost government and corporations "hundreds of billions of dollars every year for many decades, both at home and in financial and technical assistance to developing nations." Consequently, like inconvenient human rights atrocities and costly facts more generally, the global warming issue, and certainly the idea of a need for immediate and drastic action, tends not to be promoted by the corporate media arm of the corporate system. Instead, as Sherwood Rowland, whose laboratory first discovered the ozone-depleting properties of CFCs, has said: "It is quite common on the scientific side of industry to believe that there aren’t any real environmental problems, that there are just public relations problems." (Tom Athanasiou, "U.S. Politics and Global Warming," Open Magazine Pamphlet Series.)
No surprise, then, that sardonic ridicule is the order of the day. At the British dissident extreme, Pat Coyne argued in the New Statesman (June 14, 1994) that revision of the informed consensus that global warming was a genuine threat was "in the air" on the basis that predictive computer models are "necessarily simplifications," which may therefore "be drastically modified"; and on the basis of inconclusive speculations about "regular and irregular" fluctuations in the Gulf Stream and interglacial temperatures 180,000 years ago which may, or may not, imply impeded or enhanced global warming. Coyne’s conclusion was that, in chilly Britain, a bit of global warming "seems more than enticing<@133>the sooner the better." This, recall, representing the dissident extreme of mainstream journalism.
Some ten days after the IPCC’s report confirming "a discernible influence on global climate," on June 6, Taki of the Sunday Times had this to say: "The latest apocalypse, global warming, is j