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FrankBlunt
Mini Management
Joined: 07 Jul 2006
Posts: 125
Location: California, USA
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 Posted: Wed May 30, 2007 5:43 am Post subject: Semi-educational, Occasionally Deceptive Television |
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I have caught Nova, the science-based production featured on public television, red-handed in two lies. The most recent is from this evening's re-run of "Volcano Under the City", where the narrator claimed all 1,700 people died in the 1986 lake overturn in Cameroon leading to CO2 poisoning. Below I have provided the PBS transcript followed by a direct quote from one of my college texts.
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If that much CO2 is leaking from the volcano, through the fissures and into the water, Lake Kivu, the picture of calm today, could be a ticking time bomb. It's a lethal phenomenon, called "lake overturn," and it happened in Cameroon, West Africa, in 1986.
Throughout villages along the lake, dead cattle and corpses lay scattered. There was no sign of panic; 1,700 people appeared to have just dropped dead. At first, investigators were baffled. Then they discovered the smoking gun.
Lake Nyos sits inside the crater of a dormant volcano, but for hundreds of years, springs beneath the volcano continued to feed carbon dioxide gas into the bottom of the lake. A landslide into the lake triggered the gas to bubble up to the surface. When the inside of the crater was full, a cloud of CO2 spilled over the rim, crept down into the valley, silently spread through villages, suffocating every living being.
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The poisonous cloud poured silently down the valley, snuffing out the lives of 1,700 people, asleep or awake. In the village of Lower Nyos alone more than 1,200 people died, but 5 or 6 - inexplicably - survived. They told of family members eating and talking one moment and dropping dead the next. One woman woke in the morning to find her five children dead around her.
Source:
Mountains of Fire: The Nature of Volcanoes
Chapter 10 - Volcanic Catastrophes
Page 119
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Why do I think the writers chose to conceal the truth of the survivors?
1. They can't explain it, and they feel incompetent for lacking an answer
2. The survivors of that 1986 tragedy are a more sensational, mysterious, and thought-provoking topic than eruption forecasting, worthy of their own Nova special
3. Essentially they believe that you, the viewers, are stupid, and won't notice falsehoods.
The proceeding is the highest profile deception I've ever detected in science, PBS or otherwise. It constitutes faith on the part of the practitioners and educators at best, which is not a tenet of science in the first place.
As before, the PBS transcript is followed by the findings of a scientist without a paleontological political agenda. I sent Jack Horner's information to the Nova staff a few years ago, and I don't know if it's coincidence or not, but I haven't seen a dinosaur special advertised on PBS since that time. At the very least, their frequency has decreased.
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Tyrannosaurus rex, the supreme killer of the Cretaceous, terrorized some of the largest creatures ever to walk the earth and earned a permanent place in our imagination, all before the age of 30.
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T. rex: Scavenger or Predator?
A current topic in paleontology that has received much popular press is the question of whether T.rex (or other Tyrannosauridae in general) were predators or scavengers. Let's explore this issue.
Paleontologist Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies (Bozeman, MT) has proposed that T.rex could not have been a predator. His arguments against predation include its small eyes (needed to see prey), small arms (needed to hold prey), huge legs (meaning slow speed) and that there is no evidence for predation — bones have been found with tyrannosaur teeth embedded in them or scratched by them, but so far no study has shown that tyrannosaurs killed other dinosaurs for food (a bone showing tyrannosaur tooth marks that had healed would be strong evidence for predation).
His evidence supporting scavenging include its large olfactory lobes (part of the brain used for smell), and that its legs were built for walking long distances (the thigh was about the size of the calf, as in humans). Vultures have large olfactory lobes and are good at soaring to cover long distances.
There are arguments against scavenging. Most large living predators (such as lions and hyenas) do scavenge meat happily when it is available, but most do prefer fresh meat. Horner argues that its arms were too weak to grab prey, but sharks, wolves, snakes, lizards and even many birds are successful predators without using their forelimbs (if any). Whether T.rex was a slow animal is tough to tell, as our dinosaur speeds page will tell you.
What is the public to think of all this? It is suggested that you make up your own mind; the fact is that reconstructing the behavior of extinct animals is difficult, especially when there are no close modern relatives with which to compare them. Tyrannosaurs may have been scavengers, predators or both; Horner is merely presenting an opposing argument that shows that we are not yet 100% sure what ecological niche the great tyrannosaurs filled.
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Please share any inconsistencies or malicious lies that you may have encountered among scientists. I know exactly why the T. Rex continues to be touted as a vicious predator despite evidence to the contrary. It fills the museums on weekends, increases enrollment in paleontology courses, and inspires children to enter the field of study. But I'm certain Hollywood has no role in perpetuating the folklore. 
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FrankBlunt
Mini Management
Joined: 07 Jul 2006
Posts: 125
Location: California, USA
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| Posted: Wed May 30, 2007 4:41 pm Post subject: |
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At the History.com link below, sources specify, "A woman and child were the only two survivors of Lower Nyos."
http://www.history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihArticleYear&id=50666
So, is the figure 2, 5, or 6? We may never know, but I'm nearly 100% positive that Nova researchers lied.
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