Post by Admin on Jul 20, 2003 0:25:39 GMT
From TVGuide.com:
It's Amy's first day as Abbey's chief of staff and she has quite a challenge: get the President to veto his own foreign-aid bill. (The Senate has inserted an antiabortion rider in it.) In environmental news, a college friend of Toby's (Jeff Perry) has an ethical problem involving the EPA; and a glacier in Alaska has melted, causing 14 flood deaths. And there's a social note: Zoey (Elisabeth Moss) is to be installed into the DAR at a White House fete. But Abbey's membership is being challenged because, it seems, her "qualifying" ancestor was a pirate ("a privateer, actually," as C.J. puts it).
From NBC:
Abbey (Stockard Channing) is upset when an anti-abortion rider is attached to a foreign aid bill and asks Amy (Mary-Louise Parker) to work behind the scenes to torpedo the President's (Martin Sheen) proposal while Toby (Richard Schiff) gets in a legal bind when an ex-classmate (Jeff Perry) turns whistle-blower on a lawbreaking chemical company. Meanwhile, the Daughters of the American Revolution wants to disown Abbey when they learn that her distant relative was more pirate than patriot.
From Warner Bros.:
Upset because an antiabortion provision has been attached to a foreign aid bill, Abbey asks Amy (Mary-Louise Parker) to secretly help defeat the bill, which was proposed by Bartlet. Meanwhile, Toby gets into legal trouble when a former classmate exposes a lawbreaking chemical company. Also, members of the Daughters of the American Revolution want to reject Abbey when they learn that her distant relative was more of a pirate than a patriot.
It's not likely you're going to hear a strong pro-life argument on the show. I have trouble getting to it; I really do. But it's possible that what you will hear on the show is that not all people who are pro-life can fit into this mean-spirited shoebox that we tend to ... - Aaron Sorkin
It is an urban legend that Alaska has warmed so much, so fast. No matter how much the Alaskans try to debunk it, it lives on, most recently in the fevered imagination of West Wing scriptwriters.
Last summer, The New York Times ran a story quoting unnamed "federal sources" who said Alaska had warmed seven degrees in 30 years. Then it ran an editorial denouncing the U.S. government's apparent indifference to this calamity.
The Alaskan Climate Research Center (ACRC) contacted the paper and gave it data showing no such warming had taken place. The mean temperature rose about 2.4F (about 0.4C per decade) in the 1971-2000 period. The entire increase occurred in one jump in 1976-77, probably due to a circulation realignment in the Pacific Ocean. A temperature index formed using data from Fairbanks, Anchorage, Nome and Barrow (the "FANB" index) shows, if anything, a slight cooling trend since 1979.
The Times was never able to identify a source for its claim, and it printed a retraction, sort of. It did find a scientist who figured that if you look in the right places and pick an earlier start and end date you could get a mean increase of maybe 5.4 degrees over a 30 year span. In its retraction, the Times' fudged the point a bit, saying Alaska's mean temperature went up 5.4 degrees, rather than seven, over the past 30 years.
The ACRC responded again saying that no, this is still wrong. It posted a map (http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/change) showing the record of all their weather stations for the 1971-2000 interval. In the accompanying text it states: "There is not a single first-class weather station in all of Alaska, which reported 5F temperature increase for the last three decades." The highest increase, 4.2 degrees, was at Barrow. One of the lowest (1.7F) was at nearby Kotzebue.
The Times dropped the story, but it has now resurfaced on the West Wing, where earnest White House staffers will no doubt run with it for a few weeks, hoping to bludgeon the oil industry and kill a few thousand jobs in oil-producing states like, say, Alaska. Once they've moved past this plot line, the seven-degree-warming-in-30-years claim will surely pop up again somewhere, but hopefully not in the real West Wing.
It's Amy's first day as Abbey's chief of staff and she has quite a challenge: get the President to veto his own foreign-aid bill. (The Senate has inserted an antiabortion rider in it.) In environmental news, a college friend of Toby's (Jeff Perry) has an ethical problem involving the EPA; and a glacier in Alaska has melted, causing 14 flood deaths. And there's a social note: Zoey (Elisabeth Moss) is to be installed into the DAR at a White House fete. But Abbey's membership is being challenged because, it seems, her "qualifying" ancestor was a pirate ("a privateer, actually," as C.J. puts it).
From NBC:
Abbey (Stockard Channing) is upset when an anti-abortion rider is attached to a foreign aid bill and asks Amy (Mary-Louise Parker) to work behind the scenes to torpedo the President's (Martin Sheen) proposal while Toby (Richard Schiff) gets in a legal bind when an ex-classmate (Jeff Perry) turns whistle-blower on a lawbreaking chemical company. Meanwhile, the Daughters of the American Revolution wants to disown Abbey when they learn that her distant relative was more pirate than patriot.
From Warner Bros.:
Upset because an antiabortion provision has been attached to a foreign aid bill, Abbey asks Amy (Mary-Louise Parker) to secretly help defeat the bill, which was proposed by Bartlet. Meanwhile, Toby gets into legal trouble when a former classmate exposes a lawbreaking chemical company. Also, members of the Daughters of the American Revolution want to reject Abbey when they learn that her distant relative was more of a pirate than a patriot.
It's not likely you're going to hear a strong pro-life argument on the show. I have trouble getting to it; I really do. But it's possible that what you will hear on the show is that not all people who are pro-life can fit into this mean-spirited shoebox that we tend to ... - Aaron Sorkin
"A Few Good Stories"
by Paris Barclay
February 13, 2001
The Advocate
by Paris Barclay
February 13, 2001
The Advocate
It is an urban legend that Alaska has warmed so much, so fast. No matter how much the Alaskans try to debunk it, it lives on, most recently in the fevered imagination of West Wing scriptwriters.
Last summer, The New York Times ran a story quoting unnamed "federal sources" who said Alaska had warmed seven degrees in 30 years. Then it ran an editorial denouncing the U.S. government's apparent indifference to this calamity.
The Alaskan Climate Research Center (ACRC) contacted the paper and gave it data showing no such warming had taken place. The mean temperature rose about 2.4F (about 0.4C per decade) in the 1971-2000 period. The entire increase occurred in one jump in 1976-77, probably due to a circulation realignment in the Pacific Ocean. A temperature index formed using data from Fairbanks, Anchorage, Nome and Barrow (the "FANB" index) shows, if anything, a slight cooling trend since 1979.
The Times was never able to identify a source for its claim, and it printed a retraction, sort of. It did find a scientist who figured that if you look in the right places and pick an earlier start and end date you could get a mean increase of maybe 5.4 degrees over a 30 year span. In its retraction, the Times' fudged the point a bit, saying Alaska's mean temperature went up 5.4 degrees, rather than seven, over the past 30 years.
The ACRC responded again saying that no, this is still wrong. It posted a map (http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/change) showing the record of all their weather stations for the 1971-2000 interval. In the accompanying text it states: "There is not a single first-class weather station in all of Alaska, which reported 5F temperature increase for the last three decades." The highest increase, 4.2 degrees, was at Barrow. One of the lowest (1.7F) was at nearby Kotzebue.
The Times dropped the story, but it has now resurfaced on the West Wing, where earnest White House staffers will no doubt run with it for a few weeks, hoping to bludgeon the oil industry and kill a few thousand jobs in oil-producing states like, say, Alaska. Once they've moved past this plot line, the seven-degree-warming-in-30-years claim will surely pop up again somewhere, but hopefully not in the real West Wing.
"Prime time fiction"
by Ross McKitrick
April 16, 2003
National Post
by Ross McKitrick
April 16, 2003
National Post