Being relatively new to the blogosphere, I anticipated my job here would be hard work and time-consuming. But I'm finding that the irresponsibility of the mainstream media makes my job quite easy. I am starting to feel like a contestant on the new Jeff Foxworthy game show, "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?"

This week Time Magazine gets an "F" in scientific journalism - and a big heartfelt thanks from me for making my job as a blogger so easy! Read on...

In a recent Time cover story article (April 16) entitled "It's Hip to Be Green," Time correspondent Anna Kuchment proclaims that young people have "woken up the the realities of global warming." She cites a recent survey that says a majority of teens believe we need to take "immediate, drastic" action. She goes on to say that this generation is the first to feel the effects of climate change so dramatically because of freakish weather patterns and tragedies like the "Christmas 2004 tsumani." She writes that what scares kids the most are "horrible TV images of bad weather like....the tsuanmi."

Anna Kuchmant, are you smarter than a 5th grader? What about your boss, Time's Managing Editor, Richard Stengel? Did he pass Elementary school science? 

Wikipedia describes a tsunami as "a series of waves created when a body of water, such as an ocean is rapidly displaced on a massive scale by an earthquake, volcano, or meteorite." In other words, a tsunami is created underground, not in mid-air. It's not a weather-related phenomenon. Of course I knew this. And of course the deadly Christmas 2004 tsunami was caused by the second largest earthquake ever recorded on a seismograph. The flooding was the result of a giant wave, not a melting iceberg!

This is irresponsible journalism, and an example of why bloggers are fast replacing traditional journalists as fact-finders and exposers of the truth. Either the writers at Time really believe the giant Indonesian ocean wave was somehow caused by climate change, or they simply scattered this lie throughout the article to induce young people into political activism.

If the former is true, shame on Time for missing a fact most of us learned by the 5th grade: Climate is a meterological condition, while an earthquake is a geological condition. If the latter is true, well then the people at Time are not a journalists at all. They are not purvayers of the truth, but political propagandists.

No wonder our kids want "immediate" action on global warming. What's next, school shootings caused by orphaned polar bears?