What is the threshold?
Why is it that airplane crashes in, say, Nigeria, get lots of press, while car crashes in London or New York are ignored? Simply because sensationalism sells newspapers. That's why 9/11 was a catastrophe, and that's why another objectively insignificant news event may be sensationalized to sell newspapers--with horrible long-term consequences.
Personally, I think that the flooding of many of the third world coastal cities is going to be a true catastrophe. Perhaps we should calculate the Misery Index for the various scenarios that may arise due to climate change...
The problem I address, however, is wider than focussing on the press tendency to enlarge topics. Sensationalism sells stories - which is why even I was wavering to support an Iraq invasion after Powell's UN speech. But an other point is that things within the press tagged as catastrophe have simply no secure scientific foundation and yet they get repeated over and over.
("Caution: World Ending!")
It was a good magazine, once upon a time... The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman
