Meltdown in the treacle factory (Glenn’s PC) means that episode 10 of everybody’s favourite Climate Show is only available in full by podcast. We’ve resurrected the video of our interview with David Suzuki, the great Canadian environmentalist and campaigner (above), but for the full goodness — a great climate change graphic, Russian heatwave analysis, thoughts on climate communication, John “Skeptical Science” Cook introducing the new politicians’ myths section on SkS and explaining the #1 skeptic delusion (no, it isn’t the sun wot dun it), plus a whole stack of solutions — tidal power, electric motorbikes, biochar for pasture and artificial photosynthesis — you’ll have to listen to the audio version (link below). That means you’ll have to do without the graphics we so lovingly describe, but… they’re all in the show notes below the fold… (Back, with luck with pictures, in two weeks).
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News & commentary:
Today’s great graphic:
Hat-tip to John Cook at SkS:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/One-of-the-best-climate-change-ads-Ive-seen.html
Record-Breaking 2010 Eastern European/Russian Heatwave
Communicating climate issues:
1: How not to change a climate sceptic’s mind: How we interpret facts depends on who is telling us about them: the Cultural Cognition Project.
2: Distrust of climate science due to lack of media literacy: “To be climate change literate, the public must first be media literate,” since print, TV and radio reports and opinion pieces are the main ways that the public gets its information about climate change science, Cooper says.
3: People who have experienced extreme weather tend to take climate change more seriously.
Feature interview: David Suzuki, co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, is an award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster. He is renowned for his radio and television programs that explain the complexities of the natural sciences in a compelling, easily understood way. He turned 75 last week. To celebrate he’s put out a film called Force of Nature – David Suzuki’s legacy project.
Debunking the skeptic with John Cook from Skeptical Science.
Climate myths from politicians:
It’s the Sun (no, it isn’t):
Fingerprints expected from solar warming
Solar warming prediction: warming stratosphere
Solar warming prediction: days warm faster than nights
Solar warming prediction: summers warm faster than winters
Solutions
An electric motorbike: Zero Motorocycles has secured $17 million in financing from a group of investors.
10MW tidal power station gets Scottish government’s approval, but NZ’s Kaipara Harbour scheme (just consented) will be 200MW when fully installed.
Biochar Incorporation into Pasture Soil Suppresses in situ Nitrous Oxide Emissions from Ruminant Urine Patches, and Carbon News.
Daniel Nocera’s “Solar leaf†unveiled:
About the shape of a poker card but thinner, the device is fashioned from silicon, electronics and catalysts, substances that accelerate chemical reactions that otherwise would not occur, or would run slowly. Placed in a single gallon of water in a bright sunlight, the device could produce enough electricity to supply a house in a developing country with electricity for a day, Nocera said. It does so by splitting water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen.
Thanks to our media partners: Celsias.co.nz, Scoop and KiwiFM.
Theme music: A Drop In The Ocean by The Bads.
David Suzuki is pretty full on!. I notice Gareth got a word in or two!. Great stuff guys.
those damb dirty corporations eh
You seriously maintain this ain’t true?
We can look forward to your thorough debunking of Naomi Oreskes, Hoggan and Littlemore etc.? And those Tobacco and Pharma companies; I mean, you’d have to be some kind of raving Marxistâ„¢ to believe they’d ever knowingly done anything harmful to the public good purely to benefit their own shareholders’ and managers’ already outrageous incomes, wouldn’t you?
Or might we safely assume this was this just a cheap – and rather pointless – dig?
PS I remember watching a documentary at Macquarie University years ago about pharmaceutical companies that were dumping drugs that were no longer freely salable in Western markets (whether they were outrightly banned or just significantly restricted) into third world countries and promoting their use via false or deceptive information provided to doctors, including submitting blatantly fraudulent MIMS directory entries in countries that had limited scientific capacity to generate their own. The film (which it was, this was the 80s) showed interviews with representatives of the giant trans-national conglomerates who attempted to rationalise these practices (very badly, ‘spin’ was in its infancy at this stage), and I concluded on that day that, while I find the whole notion of ‘evil’ problematic, if it exists, it now wears horn-rimmed spectacles…
So the Canadian opposition leader ran on a platform of a carbon tax and lost. Yet the people want a carbon tax? Whose heads in the sand?
Eh? Perhaps you should have another go, R2?… From about 5′ 30″ to 6′ 30″.
So five years is too short. So what is his suggestion? That we have a 10 year time frame so that politicians can run a campaign on what the people want and then once in power have ten years to act against the wishes of the people? Midaz well just advocate a dictatorship.
Um, yeah. Suddenly possessed by the spirit of John* D, R2? Can I be arsed spelling out the whole 3 year election cycle (the immediate trigger to discussion) – combined with a hostile, venal commercial media, opportunists in opposition, and a population that’s big on ‘my rights’ but rather less enamoured of any responsibilities – hardly being conducive to making any unpopular, but vitally necessary, decisions? Is there any person with half-a-brain in the Western world who hasn’t nutted this out for themselves at some stage? No? So we’re left with only David Suzuki, Stalin, and Pol Pot, then?
So, nope, I can’t be bothered. You’re right. Anybody who could ever point this out is clearly in favour of whacking us all in the gulags. Suzuki probably said so right after he said everyone was actually in favour of a carbon tax! Not a vacuous strawman at all; no sirree; anybody who’s every decried the short-sightedness of ‘the people’ is clearly their enemy! Slippery-slope arguments aren’t logical fallacies. It’s obvious. *wibble*
*Sorry, “John”
“This time the monster that has come here is us”. He hasn’t moved on from his hate of the human race since his humans are maggots then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsLOcZQheoE
“One thing that I’ve gotton off on lately is that, basically, you know I studied fruit flies, and I suddenly realised that basically, we’re all fruit flies (laughter). You know you’re born as an egg, and you live in that egg environment and your parents kind of cut out all that external crap that comes in and protect you and nurish you and cloth you and all that, very nice little egg and is comfortable, but at some point you hatch out. And start crawling around and start eating stuff on your own you start reading you start looking at the tube, you start doing all sorts of things. You hatch out as a maggot! (more laughter) And a maggot, a maggot now crawl around, its got two dimensions, and it can ingest food at its will, and it defecates all over the environment, and some other smaller maggots can even eat your deification and get some nourishment, and grow as you eat more nourishment, and you molt. You become a second level maggot! You know a bigger maggot, (laughter) it even looks different, and the bigger you get, the more people, or er more maggots, you can crush with your weight, (girl: and the worlds over run with…), yeah most people in the world are content to stay as first or second level maggots, and they establish their own little area and they crawl around there and thats fine, and the guys that become tenth level maggots are really big wheels,”- David Suzuki 1972 in his hippy (pot smoking?) days
… clip ends, any one know what he says next?
Hey R2, you used that line about Suzuki before, remember?. Still funny reading now.