Kurt Sorensen is just a guy who shot a grizzly bear outside his back door in Chugiak. It was all perfectly legal, and the bear, like everything, was destined to die some day anyway. But now Sorensen is being vilified on the Internet, except, of course, when he's being glorified there.
Bruce Molnia is glaciologist who spoke frankly to a newspaper reporter about how snow accumulated on many Alaska glaciers last year instead of disappearing as has been the norm for decades. Now Molnia finds himself the Internet darling of global warming deniers, though Molnia himself agrees wholeheartedly with that large consensus of scientists saying the planet has warmed over the past 100 years. Molnia understands well that climate functions on a scale of centuries -- not on a scale of years or even decades.
The scale of centuries, unfortunately, is not a scale that translates well to the Internet where much is based on what happened five seconds ago, and never you mind if what happened then is of any significance.
Welcome to the Information Age, where the meaningless can become somehow important in the wink of an eye (see Gov. Sarah Palin on "Saturday Night Live"), and Everyman can be a scientist, an analyst, a news commentator, a social activist, a businessman or even a reporter.
This is in many ways a good thing.
Participatory democracy is built around the idea of people participating, and the Internet has brought lots of people into the game.
But this is also a bad thing, because not all information is the same, and not all people are equally credible.
Back when the mainstream media controlled the informational high ground, there were at least some standards. Reporters who blatantly made things up ceased to be reporters. They got fired. They lost their platform for spreading misinformation.
Ever hear of a blogger fired for making things up? How do you even fire a blogger?
Not that I have anything against bloggers or, for that matter, any great love for the established media of which I am a part. Frankly, I sort of like the wide-open forum of today's Internet. It's something of a throwback to America's formative days when pamphleteers were everywhere. What were they, really, but the first bloggers?
On top of this, I have a deep, fundamental belief that the answer to bad information is not less information, it's more.
Bad reporting happens. Sometimes it even happens to good reporters. It has happened to me, though I make no claims one way or the other as to being a good reporter.
That's for you to decide. That's the way the marketplace for ideas works. It's the way it should work.
Which brings me back to where I began this with Sorensen and Molnia. Since their stories appeared in the newspaper, and most especially online at adn.com, there has been considerable comment as regards both of them, but precious little new information -- if any -- has materialized.
Mainly, it would appear, both men have been used as props to promote agendas.
Bear lovers have engaged in attacking Sorensen as if somehow that is going to make the world better for bears. "Lazy, pathetic, cowardly and dangerous to his neighbors" is what one participant in an adn.com-sponsored forum said of the Chugach resident.
And these things are known exactly how? His neighbors say he goes around with his shirt undone because he's too lazy to button it? His friends say that if you even yell "boo,'' he runs in fright?
Of course, totally unsubstantiated allegations of laziness, etc., are the least of it. There were a few people who suggested Sorensen should be shot, like the bear.
This raises the level of public discourse in what way?
Look, if somebody wants to gather up some data to make a case that the Peters Creek drainage in Chugiak doesn't have enough bears and thus the few there deserve more protection, fine. Make the case.
But the level at which the issue is being debated now, well, it's like a bunch of drunks having an argument in a bar. The only difference is that these people are drunk on the power, or seeming power, the Internet gives to chattering squirrels.
Where do we all end up as a society if this becomes a standard forum for public discourse? Where do we all end up if the Internet makes drivel the currency of the realm?
All of which brings me back to Molnia, a distinguished scientist caught in a trap different from but in some ways similar to that ensnaring Sorensen. I feel a little bad about my own role in getting Molnia into his predicament. I wrote a nuanced story about Alaska glaciers and the weather. There were comments in that story that could easily be taken out of context, and they were.
"Does it really matter what anyone thinks?" Molnia asked me this week. "People pick up the pieces. They take phrases out of context. Your story has made me the darling of the anti-global warming (forces). I was even told Rush Limbaugh spent three minutes citing what you've written."
I don't know what Limbaugh said. I haven't heard it, and I'm not a Limbaugh basher. So I'm not going to attack him without hearing it.
I have, however, read some of the Internet stories and found some entertaining distortions:
"A bitterly cold Alaskan summer has had surprising results. For the first time in the area's recorded history, area glaciers have begun to expand, rather than shrink."
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
The summer sucked, but it was far from "bitterly cold.'' It was on average 3 degrees colder than the norm. And the glaciers didn't really expand. They thickened in an interesting but so far insignificant way. Think of this in terms of an obesely fat, old guy; he added an unnoticeable inch to his waistline as his height continued to diminish due to age.
"I do find this fascinating,'' Molnia said. "My youngest son lives in Fairbanks. I talked to him the other day. He said, 'Some of my friends said you're stirring up a rat's nest' " with talk of how Alaska glaciers might have thickened last year.
They did. But the change amounted to no more than a hiccup in the climatological record. It doesn't mean anything at the moment. It doesn't mean global warming is over. It doesn't mean global cooling has begun.
It means there was one year in many years when something other than the norm happened. It takes a lot of similar years to establish a new norm. Twenty years from now, this one data point could have great significance. Now it has little to none.
Unless you're someone who wants to take an isolated data-point and go, as Molnia puts it, "where no rational man has gone before."
Scientists are disinclined to do this because they have reputations to protect. In the world of science, the fact remains that if you make a claim you best have at least some evidence to back it up, or somebody will call you out as a fraud.
In the world of the Internet, it's different. Joe Sixblogger doesn't have much of a reputation, if any, to worry about protecting, and even if he did, the standards for defending anything posted on the Internet are extremely low.
It would be easy to get discouraged by all of this, but I'm not. The Internet is comparatively new. It is still sorting itself out. The marketplace will eventually decide things, because bad ideas and bad information never sell. Or at least they never sell for long.
People might not like the so-called mainstream media or trust them all that much, but when it comes down to needing to know things, they trust it more than inebriated, loudmouth-neighbor Joe down the street. Over time, I'm convinced, a similar understanding will develop as regards the Internet. There will be Web sites that people turn to because they develop some sense of trust in the intelligence and integrity of people feeding information into those sites, and there will be other sites that fade or die for an equal and opposite reason.
Until then, Sorensen and Molnia and others will just have to suffer like the rest of us. The Internet puts a library at our fingertips, but sometimes you have to put up with a lot of graffiti on the way to the reading room.
Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
CRAIG MEDRED
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