[youtube=http://youtu.be/1iVDHiOEBvw]
Al Gore
Al Gore Riffs On Climate Reality
If you missed Climate Reality’s recent 24 hour marathon focused on the link between dirty weather and dirty energy, here’s one of the videos, a fun “symphony of science” auto-tuned compilation featuring Al Gore and climate science:
A musical creation about the reality of global climate change from the live broadcast of 24 Hours of Reality – The Dirty Weather Report. The Symphony of Science is a musical project of John D Boswell, designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1iVDHiOEBvw]
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In case the link above stops working (which it has once already, mysteriously changing to an ad for Climate Reality t-shirts), here’s another Symphony of Science compilation on climate science put out by Mr. Boswell:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HHP9Rh-ooh0]
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One of the great things to come out of Climate Reality is a new tool for pushing back at the nonsense spread in the mainstream media by anti-science climate deniers, Reality Drop. It’s focused on “spreading truth, and destroying denial.” With the deep pockets of the fossil fuel industry obscuring this debate, any new tool is useful; this one uses gaming and social media to make slaying deniers on-line fun as well as gratifying!
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/52029145]
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It’s Time For the Silent Majority To Speak Up, The Eyes Of The Future Are On Us
As part of the 24 Hours of Climate Reality, this video was put together to remind us – parents, children, young adults, grandparents concerned about the environmental crisis our world is facing – that the voice of the people is the strongest thing, stronger than any other special interest or power, and that when people stand together and draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough, change will happen. We can look to Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, the Berlin wall, and Egypt’s Tahrir Square. These, and many others throughout history, are examples where people stood up for change, for what was right, against huge obstacles, and change happened. Are you ready to become part of a not-so-silent majority, who will demand accountability and change from our elected officials?
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/29108206]
*thanks to Sherry over at One Earth To Live for the link to the video!
More links:
Climate Denial Hits the Fan
Al Gore’s 24 hours of Climate Reality has been running online since 7:00 pm yesterday. If you haven’t had a chance to tune in yet, there’s still time to tune in for a good dose of climate reality, as well as a good look at the climate deniers and their spin, and real answers to the dilemma that we’re in together as a global community.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyW-1PRtJdE]
My favourite quote so far – although there has been lots of great discussion – is from a climate scientist,who said his response to the question “Do you believe in climate change?”, is “Do you believe in thermometers? If you believe in thermometers, then you believe in climate change, as the increased global temperature is measurable.”
Don’t miss it!
To watch the last 2 hours, go to ClimateRealityProject.org.
What Can Change In A Day?
In the Climate Reality Project, Al Gore answers the question, “What Can Change In a Day?”. A whole lot, it turns out – just ask the people living on the Susquehanna River last week when Tropical Storm Lee hit then and displaced them, or the folks in New Orleans about Hurricane Katrina, or the people along the Gulf Coast still recovering from the BP disaster.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY-mboZkhD0&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PLBDFB84FC637BF088]
If you haven’t yet signed up to host a Climate Reality event tomorrow, it isn’t too late. Just go to Climate Reality Project.org, and join their project to reveal the complete truth about the climate crisis and watch the live stream starting at 7pm CT on September 14.
Nashville: Al Gore’s Mistress Revealed
When Al Gore and his wife Tipper recently chose to go public with the dissolution of their marriage, the blogosphere went wild as climate change deniers took gleeful delight in the news. Showing extremely poor taste, these bloggers crowed about the failure of the 40 year marriage, and terms like “crazed sex poodle” surfaced (yes, really!). First, Mr. Gore was accused of having an affair with Larry David’s ex-wife Laurie, producer of An Inconvenient Truth, which she denied. Now a hotel masseuse has stepped into the limelight to accuse him of sexual assault (of which, apparently, there is no proof). Now, if these deniers were really interested in the science of climate change, and not merely sensationalism and smear tactics, there would be no personal attacks on the former Vice President, or anyone else for that matter. However, as anyone who is familiar with both climate science and the concerted effort by the fossil fuel industry to discredit the science and the scientists would know, personal attacks are one of the weapons in the deniers’ arsenal. For more on this, check out Peter Sinclair’s latest Climate Crock of the Week.
So, who is Gore’s “real” mistress? Gore is currently in Nashville training people to become champions for the climate, as part of The Climate Project. Given his dedication and commitment to the cause of climate justice and the environment, it is safe to say that he has not one, but two mistresses – Mother Earth and Lady Justice.
Links:
Report: Gore Accuser Failed Lie Detector Test (link added July 17, 2010)
Climate Change & North American Obesity Epidemic: Both Require Radical Paradigm Shift
Since I discovered Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution” while writing last Monday’s blog posting, my family and I have become devoted fans of both the show and the man himself. I had heard of the British celebrity chef before, and a few years ago gave one of his cookbooks to my young nephew, George, for Christmas. George is a “foodie” from way back – according to his mom, he was eating black olives at the age of one, and started boycotting McDonald at the tender age of eight. At 13, George is on his way to being the best cook in a family of good cooks. George was way ahead of me and my family in joining the Jamie Oliver fan club, but as I mentioned we are now firmly in that group.
One thing I find interesting about “Food Revolution” from my perspective as a mother and educator concerned about climate change, is the resistance that Jamie runs up against time and time again when trying to change American’s attitude towards food. Several of the people he encounters in Episode One are openly hostile, even though Oliver has the numbers from the Center for Disease Control (aka “scientific proof”) to back up the claim that Huntington Virginia, the American city that he chose to launch his “revolution” in, is the unhealthiest city in the nation. Huntington has the highest obesity rate in an increasingly obese country, with the increased disease and death rates that go with that statistic. Yet, local radio show host Rod Willis who says “We don’t want to sit around and eat lettuce all day…I just don’t think you can come in and tell us what to do. Who made you the king?”
This is reminiscent of the tone of the climate change discussion in North America. We North Americans are addicted to our unhealthy fast food to fuel our bodies in the same way we are addicted to unhealthy fossil fuels to fuel our cars and our economy. Both the food system and the energy system are entrenched and efforts to change either of them come up against stiff resistance. And both are disastrous in the long-term, for our bodies’ health and the health of the planet.
The climate change deniers try to paint Al Gore as incompetent scientifically and money-grubbing, and attempt to refute the scientific evidence piling up against the claims that people can’t change the earth’s climate, or claim that climate scientists are conspiring to perpetrate a fraud on an unsuspecting public, and so on. One look around the streets of Huntington, and it’s abundantly clear that there is a problem with super-sized adults and children, with the correspondingly super-sized health problems. Yet, like the climate change deniers who wouldn’t recognize a melting glacier if it was sitting in their backyard, there are many people in Huntington who aren’t willing to acknowledge that there is a problem. And these same people seem very willing to attack Jamie for trying to bring attention to the disastrous diet that children are fed in the schools every day, and in many homes.
Yet Jamie soldiers on against the odds, because he seems to care deeply about giving children a better future. He works to change the food served to children one school at a time, against a system that calls a deep-fried chicken burger and fries a balanced meal because there’s an optional salad with it, and yet claims a 7-vegetable pasta dish isn’t balanced because “there’s not enough vegetables in it” (and yes, french fries are considered a vegetable!). Jamie Oliver is inspirational for me, both as a mom who has always tried to feed her family healthy food (with occasional lapses, I admit) and as a climate change activist. As he said to the skeptical radio show host, “If everybody in America was like you, nothing would get done.” That’s a good response to climate change deniers as well!
Here’s “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” Episode One, Part One:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7eaHytpJWQ]
If you want to watch more, most past episodes are available on YouTube.
If you want to show your support for Jamie, you can sign a petition. Click here to go to the petition page (if you are not in the USA, there’s a link to click on that will take you to an international petition).
If you’re on Facebook, you can click here to become a fan on the Food Revolution page.
Click here to read Elizabeth Kolbert’s article, “Why are Americans fat?” in The New Yorker, from July 20, 2009.
Icebergs, Ice Hockey, and Other News
It’s been an eventful weekend. On Saturday, Chile experienced an earthquake that registered 8.8 on the Richter scale and left more than700 people dead, and the country’s second largest city without electricity and water. News of giant chunks of Antarctic ice floating towards Australia was also in the headlines the past few days. And, as the Olympics in Vancouver wrapped up, Canada won gold in the men’s hockey final against the U.S. in a nail-biter of a game – Go Canada!!
Here’s some discussion from the blogosphere on these, and other, issues of interest:
- NPR has an interesting discussion about how one’s response to climate change is dependent the world view one holds going into the discussion:
Over the past few months, polls show that fewer Americans say they believe humans are making the planet dangerously warmer, despite a raft of scientific reports that say otherwise.
This puzzles many climate scientists — but not some social scientists, whose research suggests that facts may not be as important as one’s beliefs.
Click here for more on the NPR discussion, Belief in Climate Change Hinges on Worldview.
- Senator Al Gore responded to anti-science climate skeptics in an op-ed piece in the New York Times on Saturday entitled We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change:
It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.
Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.
But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.
Click here to read the entire column.
- In relation to natural disasters and climate change, the bloggers at Make Wealth History.org have a recent post on this subject that includes two graphs from the insurance company Munich Re which track the pattern of natural disasters around the world for the past 50 years. As the graph below indicates, the increase in disasters closely tracks the rise in global temperatures, which rose most sharply in the 1990s and continued to rise, but more gradually, in the past decade.
Great weather catastrophes 1950 – 2009. Munich Re Insurance Company
Click here to read the article Climate Change and Natural Disasters or here to go right to the Munich Re website.
- In response the icebergs breaking off the Antarctic ice sheet and floating towards Australia, Andy Russell’s weather-related blog examines the general climate situation in the South Pole region, with great pictures and links to peer-reviewed articles. Check it out the posting, Antarctic Climate Change – The Exception That Proves the Rule? here.
- And, finally, a picture from yesterday’s gold medal hockey game. Click here to watch the gold medal moment on YouTube.
Canadian men's hockey teams wins Olympic gold. (MATT SLOCUM / The Associated Press)
Time for New Thinking on the Climate Crisis
The UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen begins today! If you are the praying sort, take time today to send a prayer that scientific and moral values will prevail, and our children’s future will be preserved.
Here’s a short video that won the Ecospot Video Grand Prize:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-S1xOG6FDQ]
And after you’ve watched it, if you are the emailing sort, contact your elected representative and let them know that you want a real deal in Copenhagen. Let’s stop ignoring the 1.2 billion elephants in the room!
And if you’re ready to be inspired to more action, click on this link or go to #2 on my video list on the right to hear Al Gore’s address at TED in March 2008. Thanks to Krystofer for bringing this to my attention!
“Our Choice” Presents a Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis
I’m on a weekend trip to Vancouver, British Columbia this weekend (I’ll address carbon credits when traveling by air in an upcoming blog), so will keep my postings short and sweet. I’ve just picked up Al Gore’s new book “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis” and will share a paragraph from it with you.
In any case, despair serves no purpose when reality still offers hope. Despair is simply another form of denial, and it invites inaction. We don’t have time for despair. The solutions are available to us! We need to make our choice to act now.
Mr. Gore goes on to quote an African proverb:
If you want to go quickly, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.
Enjoy your weekend, and don’t despair – make a choice to act! Remember, when people lead, leaders follow.