Tag: Hansen

Across the university

My computer asked me to update iTunes this morning, and with the latest version installed a whim took me to the Music Store, then into iTunes U – Apple’s rather US-centric title for a huge collection of university lectures and podcasts, audio and video, from academic institutions around the world. There’s stuff from Otago, Yale, Stanford, Cambridge – and recently added, lectures from my alma mater. If you use iTunes and have an account at the Music Store (you can open an account by giving them a credit card number, but do not then have to buy anything) there is a huge amount of free material available for download. I have a couple of lectures from University of California’s Santa Barbara campus (UCTV) to watch: James Hansen giving the Nierenberg lecture at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, and a lecture on methane hydrates. It’s a great resource – but be warned, you need lots of bandwidth to take advantage of the videos…

If you have any favourites from iTunes U, let us know in the comments.

[Title reference]

Would you give this man any creedence?

It’s YouTube weekend chez Hot Topic: Sunday’s offering is the Two-Mile Time Machine man and all-round ice expert, Dr Richard B Alley, giving a (ahem) creditable rendering of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary, with a message about coal and climate.

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(Full story of Alley’s rock videos at Dot Earth). [References]

Alley’s riffing on coal captures the zeitgeist, what with Greenpeace campaigners in the UK escaping conviction for vandalising a coal-burning power station chimney by painting UK PM Gordon Brown’s name on it (over here they’d fall foul of the Electoral Finance Act), thanks in no small part to testimony by James Hansen (testimony (pdf), recent paper).

Way off-topic, but I can’t let this video weekend pass without mentioning the Large Hadron Rap. Damn catchy, and didactic to boot – even features a guest appearance from MC Hawking. New frontiers in science communication…

Fight test

homer.jpg A few months ago I posted about a presentation by science historian Naomi Oreskes, discussing the roots of denial. John Mashey (in comments at Deltoid, since promoted to a post) draws attention to another Oreskes talk – You CAN Argue With The Facts – which looks in some detail at how the Western Fuels Association test marketed climate dissent. Oreskes is typically incisive, but I found her calm dissection of the cynical application of professional marketing techniques to create an illusion (and later, the fact) of dissent truly shocking. If you were wondering where Hansen got his “prosecute the CEOs” call from, this is the context. Required viewing for all pol sci and mass comms students (you know who you are 😉 )…

The denial twist

hansen.jpg James Hansen [CV], the most outspoken climate scientist in the world, has been stirring up something of a furore. Invited by the Democrats to speak in Washington on the 20th anniversary of his famous 1988 testimony to Congress on the dangers of global warming, he used to opportunity to complain about the funding of climate disinformation campaigns by fossil fuel companies [full text]:

Special interests have blocked transition to our renewable energy future. Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming. CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature. Conviction of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal CEOs will be no consolation, if we pass on a runaway climate to our children.

Prosecuted for “high crimes against humanity and nature”. That’s a pretty radical view and not surprisingly the climate disinformers have been hard at work trying to rubbish the idea – and Hansen and his work.

Continue reading “The denial twist”

Something 4 The Weekend

Bali continues to make headlines. The rough positions are becoming clear. China’s playing hardball – no mandatory cuts, West has to cut first and most deeply. The New York Times‘ Andy Revkin has a couple of good Bali posts on his blog: the first suggests that the IPCC may have to revise its goal for the next report – updating AR4 for the conclusion of the post-Kyoto process in 2009, while the second looks at what’s going on around the negotiations. Meanwhile, 200 scientists from around the world, coordinated by the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, issued a statement calling on the conference to aim for emissions cuts of at least 50% by 2050 [Herald, Globe & Mail (Canada)].

Meanwhile, there’s lots more below the fold (as they say on the broadsheets)….

Continue reading “Something 4 The Weekend”