[updated with a link, and a quote, about ClimateGate]
… we would probably be at the moment of the peripeteia-–the reversal of fortune for the hero-protagonist:
According to Aristotle, this should be an event that occurs contrary to the audience’s expectations and that is therefore surprising, but that nonetheless appears as a necessary outcome of the preceding actions.
Is that true about ClimateGate?
a scandal that has done what many slide shows and public-service ads could not: focus public attention on the science of a warming planet.
Except now, much of that attention is focused on the science’s flaws. Leaked just before international climate talks begin in Copenhagen — the culmination of years of work by scientists to raise alarms about greenhouse-gas emissions — the e-mails have cast those scientists in a political light …
In an effort to control what the public hears, did prominent scientists who link climate change to human behavior try to squelch a back-and-forth that is central to the scientific method? Is the science of global warming messier than they have admitted? [emphasis added]
Well, so huge is the scandal, suggests Steven Hayward, that he anticipates the collapse of Kyoto-Copenhagen [emphasis added]:
Climate alarmists and their media cheerleaders are fond of warning about “tipping points” to disaster, but ironically this episode may represent a tipping point against the alarmists. The biggest hazard to serious climate science all along was not so much contrarian arguments from skeptics, but rather the damage that the hyperbole of the environmental community would inflict on their own cause.
Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future. Yet the hysteria of the global warming campaigners and their monomaniacal advocacy of absurdly expensive curbs on fossil fuel use have led to a political dead end that will become more apparent with the imminent collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process.
Meanwhile, the ClimateGate story is strictly an “undernews“¹ phenomenon—all over the blogosphere and all over the British press (which asserts that “public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails”), but it has been a non-story and a non-event in the MSM.
That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s not a developing story, because indeed it is.
At the Freakonomics blog, Steven Stephen Dubner describes the state of play on ClimateGate:
[I]t’s become strikingly clear that one’s view of the issue is deeply colored by his or her incoming biases. No surprise there, but still, the demarcation is stark. …
Those who feel that global warming is the most pressing issue of our era, a potential catastrophe that needs to be addressed by governments around the world as soon as possible, generally argue that ClimateGate is a tempest in a teapot — little more than the sort of academic infighting and nasty language you’d find by raiding any academic’s hard drive; …
The other side, meanwhile, …feels that the C.R.U. material proves what they’ve been arguing all along: that the threat of global warming lies somewhere between exaggeration and hoax; that it is a conventional wisdom produced by an alarmist cabal of climate scientists …
But awareness was growing, Dubner wrote yesterday:
In just the past few days, there has been a ton of coverage. Still, they complain that the major American TV networks are ignoring the story, leaving it to Jon Stewart to break the news.
And indeed the story is breaking through to the MSM, according to NewsBusters.
WaPo Puts ClimateGate at the Top of Page One
NBC Nightly News Takes Up ClimateGate, But Frets It Could ‘Delay Taking Action’
But the most interesting players are attracting only a minimum of attention for their actions during this developing story.
Obama Ignores ‘Climate-Gate‘ in Revising Copenhagen Plans
Obama Says He Concentrating on Jobs
The Associated Press
Video: Climategate emails cancel Al Gore’s appearance at Climate Summit
———
¹ I’m using the term in the sense that Mickey Kaus used it here:
[T]here’s a second way to divide the electorate that asks how the voters inform themselves. Do they rely on the traditional Mainstream Media (MSM), or do they get their political information from the Web, from cable news, from the tabloids, etc. This division may have once seemed unimportant, but it doesn’t anymore–its seriousness is suggested by the MSM’s impressive resistance to stories bubbling up from the blogs and the tabs that don’t meet MSM standards (putting aside whether you regard those standards as high or merely idiosyncratic). “Rielle Hunter”–the woman whom the National Enquirer alleges was John Edwards’ mistress–was the top-searched name on the MSN site at one point Thursday, I’m told. Meanwhile, in the traditional mainstream press, ‘Rielle Hunter” was mentioned only … well, zero times. Of the two ways to divide the electorate, the second is arguably more important. After all, even those who don’t follow politics, will eventually inform themselves before the election.** But if the MSM/Web barrier remains as robust as it’s been, those who inform themselves from the MSM will find out something different, when they finally tune in, than those who go to the Web and learn both the news and what might be called the “undernews.” ***
But I note that the late William Safire was using the term back in 1997:
”Have you noticed how little news is coming out of Washington these days?” a reporter asked.
On the surface, that’s so. But like the sound unheard by human ear or the sight unseen by human eye, momentous events are taking place not yet reportable. Court-suppressed information, destined to be tomorrow’s headlines, is today’s ”undernews.”
For Safire, “undernews” was not yet reportable because it was rumor, gossip, unconfirmed, or otherwise sketchy.
Today, “undernews” is the juicy stuff, and what the MSM “reports” is either useless, because it is spin, or it is undervalued because, compared to the stuff on cable and the undernews, it is boring (speaking from the point of view of storytelling, that is).
