Climate Denial Crock of the Week

You may have seen portions of this interview with Senior Climate Scientist Mike MacCracken in this fall’s Sea Ice Minimum video, and you may remember him for his classic and agonizingly spot-on 1982 lecture at Sandia Lab, which I covered here.

I interviewed Mike this past August in San Francisco. This is the complete 13 and a half minutes, and worth listening to.

Jerry Mitrovica of Harvard discusses some of the counter-intuitive details of sea level metrics.

Barry Bickmore is Associate Professor of Geological Sciences at Brigham Young University. His research specialties are low-temperature geochemistry and geoscience education. In this presentation, he discusses how he moved from being a climate change “skeptic” to being an outspoken advocate of mainstream climate science. He then discusses how it is that people like him can so effectively avoid the truth about climate change. (about 40 minutes)

I’ll be updating my video on solar effects and the bogus “The Sun is doing it” crocks soon.

In the meantime here is a very well done, short, NASA film describing the most noticeable cycles of the sun.

Lovins will be a keynote speaker for this year’s Bioneers conference, saturday. The main event is held in San Rafael, CA, but broadcasts a number of the key speakers to satellite locations around the country.

I gave a well attended presentation at the Traverse City Michigan location on Friday, and hope to watch some of the national speakers on saturday.  I almost always hear something that surprises, delights, and/or informs me, often from a speaker I had not heard before.

Lovins talk will be kind of a launch pad for his new book, Reinventing Fire. If you’ve seen Lovins talk in the last few years, the first half of the video above will be review – in the second half he has some more recent information, especially on electrical production.

The topic is water, but the parallels to our need to manage carbon in the biosphere are, I think, obvious.

This is the smartest, most engaging conversation you will hear this week.

It’s great to listen to someone who is genuinely inspired by a cool idea, and is making it work.
If you’re stuck on a project, and need some inspiration, check this out.

SnapGoods  CEO Ron J. Williams discusses the “access economy”. Just like Zip Cars offers consumers personal transportation, rather than car ownership, – as a service, – SnapGoods (“Own Less, Do  More” – could this be a perfect slogan for a more sustainable society?) facilitates the  use and sharing of goods through social communities. (You may not be able to justify buying that gadget – but what if you could get one just for that project this weekend?….)

“The SnapGoods consumer is very much a New Consumer,” says Baranowski. “It was exciting to talk with Ron about a shift we’ve been tracking over the last few years, from an ownership mindset to one of collaborative consumption—which is, of course, easier on the wallet and better for the environment. We believe the ‘access economy’ will create opportunities for innovative, more sustainable business models.”

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The BBC produced a documentary broadcast on september 15, examining nuclear safety in light of the Fukushima events.  It’s a generally pro-nuclear piece, but there are certainly images in here, particularly of Japanese exclusion-zone refugees, that would have to give almost anyone pause..

The program presenter is a nuclear physicist who tells us he is completely neutral in the argument.  I’m posting the whole thing here since so many people seem to be angry with me for perceived anti-nuclear bias. ( I think I’m a nuclear realist, actually – but more on that in the future)

Below, a recent, very similarly formatted investigation on Australian “60 Minutes”, had a different perspective – which includes impacts on the rescue workers who responded to the disaster, and illnesses other than thyroid cancer, which BBC focuses on exclusively.

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I was going to wait on this, but it’s too important. The point has often been made that the climate denial industry is based on the disinformation techniques pioneered and developed by the Tobacco industry – Naomi Oreskes does it elsewhere on this page. There’s a lot of footage here of tobacco flacks presenting to media and congress.

The parallels between “there is still debate about the link between smoking and cancer” and “there is still debate about the link between CO2 and global climate” are obvious.

See if you can pick out the specific techniques – and see if you can listen to this whole film without getting nauseous as I did.

See today’s post on the Tobacco Denial Industry. The same folks that brought you “Doctor’s Prefer Camels” are today bringing you “There is no global warming”.

Below, you can also watch Oreske’s longer  “American Denial of Global Warming”.

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