global warming deniers

James Cameron Takes on Global Warming Deniers

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James Cameron, whose eco-epic Avatar has passed another of his movies, Titanic, to become the highest grossing movie of all time, is fed up with the global warming deniers. At a recent press conference, Cameron said:

“I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with these boneheads… Anybody that is a global-warming denier at this point in time has got their head so deeply up their ass I’m not sure they could hear me.  Look, at this point I’m less interested in making money for the movie and more interested in saving the world that my children are going to inhabit. How about that? I mean look, I didn’t make this movie with these strong environmental anti-war themes in it to make friends on the right, you know…But you know they’ve got to live in this world too. And their children do as well, so they’re going to have to be answerable to this at some point.”

And as for the crazed right-wing ranter Glenn Beck, who in the past has called Cameron “the AntiChrist”, Cameron had this to say:

He’s dangerous because his ideas are poisonous…I couldn’t believe when he was on CNN. I thought, what happened to CNN? Who is this guy? Who is this madman? And then of course he wound up on Fox News, which is where he belongs, I guess.

At Global Green USA’s 7th Annual Pre-Oscar Party, Cameron called for a mobilisation to tackle climate change, of a scale similar to that of World War II.

While Cameron may lack some diplomatic skills, it is refreshing to hear honest push back against the denial machine and a call to action from someone with Cameron’s ability to grab the spotlight. Check out this video on the vision that prompted Cameron to make Avatar:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geNv6FUK0HU]

Links:

Avatar’s Release to be Environmentally Themed, Thanks to Climate Deniers – TreeHugger.com

Optimism In Trying Times

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I’ve been feeling discouraged lately – there are so many people trying to alert the rest of the world to the dangerous and suicidal course that we are on with our addiction to fossil fuels, and yet so very many powerful and loud voices are trying to drown out the voices of sanity and science.  And addiction is a difficult thing to change, whether it’s heroin or fossil fuels.  Will we be able to wean ourselves before our addiction kills us?  The next twenty years will tell.

Oh, right, I was going to write about optimism.  Sorry. As I mentioned a few days ago, I just read “No Impact Man” by Colin Beavan, and would highly recommend it (and I should thank my daughter’s boyfriend, Krystofer, who bought the book and then graciously allowed me to read it before he did). Marion Nestle, author of “What to Eat” describes the book as:

“A riveting account of the year in which Colin Beavan and his wife attempt what most of us would consider impossible. What might seem inconvenient to the point of absurdity instead teaches lessons that all of us need to learn. We as individuals can take action to address important social problems. One person can make a difference.”

At the beginning of his year of living no-impact, Beavan examined the work of psychologists who study happy people and what makes them happier than the rest of us.

What the positive psychologists had learned was that, while getting a new cell phone or a new car or a new house did give us a burst of pleasure, the pleasure did not last. If we wanted to feel the same spike of happiness, we would have to get another fix – yet another phone, yet another car. They called that mode of pleasure-seeking the “hedonic treadmill”.

The happiest people, the shrinks discovered, did not live their lives in this perpetual loop. Rather, these folks had raised their baseline mood in ways that did not require repeated doses of new stuff. The people most satisfied with life, it turned out, had strong social connections, found meaning in their work, got to exercise what they considered to be their highest talents, and had a sense of some higher purpose.

The positive psychologists confirmed scientifically, in other words, what simple-living advocates have been asserting for so long anecdotally: a life lived with less emphasis on acquisition might have the effect of leaving more time for richer, less resource-intensive life awards, making both the planet and the people happier.

So, it turns out that all of this consuming and working long hours to make money so we can consume even more isn’t making us any happier – less so, actually!  Some voices in the climate change debate encourage passivity and inaction by  saying things like  “there might be global warming or cooling but the important issue is whether we, as a human race, can do anything about it.” These voices are trying to send us the message that the choices that we make aren’t important, and that we should just carry on in our usual way. It turns out, as Beavan’s story demonstrates, one person’s choices can make a difference at the same time as that person becomes happier, healthier (with a better sex life, too, according to Beavan:).

Here’s a video from the folks at The Fun Theory.com, a site dedicated to the thought that human behavior can be changed for the better by making the change fun.  The video shows how 66% more people ended up taking the stairs rather than the escalator by making climbing the stairs more fun that usual:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw]

Have a fun, planet-loving kind of Friday!

“Hockey Stick” DeBunkers Iced

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University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver was on the CBC radio show “The Current” yesterday to discuss the inaccurate predictions in the most recent IPCC report about the rate of melting of the Himalayan glaciers.  Dr. Weaver has been involved in authoring 3 earlier IPCC reports.  He noted that none of the scientists involved in writing the report get any financial compensation for their time and effort.  This flies in the face of the wild accusations from the contrarians’ camp that scientists are profiting hand over fist from “advocating” global warming.  How many oil and gas executives can assert that they don’t profit – and pretty richly – from their activities?

To hear the discussion, click here , and go to “Listen to Part I”.

The contrarians and deniers have got a lot of mileage out of the errors in the IPCC report – which, Dr.Weaver points out in the discussion mentioned above, is one page of a 4,000 page report – yet some interesting things are starting to come out about the anti-climate science bias in the U.S.Congress and Senate.  Deniers particularly like to point out – over and over, as you will see if you check out the “comments” section on any on-line article on climate change  – that Dr. Micheal Mann’s “hockey stick” analysis of warming trends in the Northern Hemisphere over the last millenia is inaccurate (for a quick summary of the “hockey stick” controversy, click here). Canadians Steve McIntyre, a retired mining executive with ties to oil and gas companies, and Ross McKitrick , an economist linked to the right-wing Fraser Institute, have been particularly vocal and active in “debunking” Mann’s analysis.  As DeSmogBlog points out (“M & M” refers to McKitrick and McIntyre):

It becomes increasingly clear that while scientists have been building an undeniable case for the science of global warming, M&M have been working hand-in-hand with people like the denier PR guru Tom Harris to deny it all, anyway.

One of the things that has put wind in M & M’s hockey-stick-debunking sails is an “independent” investigation by the Republican-dominated U.S. Energy and Commerce Congressional Committee. The panel they assembled produced the Ad Hoc Committee Report on the ‘Hockey Stick’ Global Climate Reconstruction” (or “Wegman Report”). However,Canadian blogger Deep Climate has uncovered information that puts the independence and credibility of the Wegman panel, and the entire Energy and Commerce Committee, in doubt.  He sums it up this way:

In short, the Energy and Commerce Committee refused the offer of a proper scientific review from the National Academy of Sciences in favour of an investigative process that was ad hoc, biased and unscientific. And the report resulting from that process is tainted with highly questionable scholarship.

Click here to read Deep Climate’s full report.