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As Daniel Sieberg continues his picturesque treatment of global warming with his Arctic Ocean video for CBS' series Journey to the Top of the World, NBC took a contrasting wonkish approach for Anne Thompson's In Depth feature. Thompson traced the evolving rhetoric of global warming contrarians inside-the-Beltway. Experts at thinktanks like the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute used to deny the accuracy of models that demonstrated that human-generated greenhouse gases are causing the climate to change. Now they concede the phenomenon--they just contradict its catastrophic consequences: "Manmade pollution warms the Earth," Thompson paraphrased, "but will not melt Greenland or raise sea levels to wash away one third of Florida."
As for Sieberg, Monday he showed us shrinking glaciers; Tuesday he focused on arctic wildlife; now Sieberg turns to human interest, following oceanologist Eddie Carmack's technique for calculating how the melted ice ends up circulating through warmer waters. Carmack's "folk science" gimmick is the message in the bottle: on each research trip he throws bottles overboard hoping for finders to report where they wash up. Out of 4,000 dispatched, he has so far heard from 150, each taking about two years to be found. Some destinations are obvious--Alaska, Norway--but other bottles have bobbled from the Arctic to France, and even to Brazil.
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