What’s YOUR big idea to make the world a cleaner, greener place? Sundance Channel wants to know with the What’s the Big Idea? short film contest sponsored by Lexus.
Submit a one-minute short film featuring your biggest, boldest, greenest eco-solutions. Grand prize is TEN thousand dollars to make your idea into reality, and a one-year lease of a new Lexus hybrid!
http://www.sundancechannel.com/thegreen/
Also check out The Green, a new block of programming on Sundance Channel focusing entirely on environmental topics and discussion.
Contest is on now and ends April 30, 2007. See official site for additional rules and details. Feel free to post questions and ideas to this thread. Good luck!
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April 19th, 2007
Global warming scientists are under intense pressure to water down findings, and are then accused of silencing their critics
The drafting of reports by the world’s pre-eminent group of climate scientists is an odd process. For months scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tussle over the evidence. Nothing gets published unless it achieves consensus. This means that the panel’s reports are conservative - even timid. It also means that they are as trustworthy as a scientific document can be.
Then, when all is settled among the scientists, the politicians sweep in and seek to excise from the summaries anything that threatens their interests.
The scientists fight back, but they always have to make concessions. The report released on Friday, for example, was shorn of the warning that “North America is expected to experience locally severe economic damage, plus substantial ecosystem, social and cultural disruption from climate change related events”.
This is the opposite of the story endlessly repeated in the rightwing press: that the IPCC, in collusion with governments, is conspiring to exaggerate the science. No one explains why governments should seek to amplify their own failures. In the wacky world of the climate conspiracists no explanations are required. The world’s most conservative scientific body has somehow been transformed into a conspiracy of screaming demagogues.
This is just one aspect of a story that is endlessly told the wrong way round. In the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail, in columns by Dominic Lawson, Tom Utley and Janet Daley, the allegation is repeated that climate scientists and environmentalists are trying to “shut down debate”. Those who say that man-made global warming is not taking place, they claim, are being censored.
Something is missing from their accusations: a single valid example. The closest any of them have been able to get is two letters sent - by the Royal Society and by the US senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe - to that delicate flower ExxonMobil, asking that it cease funding lobbyists who deliberately distort climate science. These correspondents had no power to enforce their wishes. They were merely urging Exxon to change its practices. If everyone who urges is a censor, then the comment pages of the newspapers must be closed in the name of free speech.
In a recent interview, Martin Durkin, who made Channel 4’s film The Great Global Warming Swindle, claimed he was subject to “invisible censorship”. He seems to have forgotten that he had 90 minutes of prime-time television to expound his theory that climate change is a green conspiracy. What did this censorship amount to? Complaints about one of his programmes had been upheld by the Independent Television Commission. It found that “the views of the four complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing” and that they had been “misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part”. This, apparently, makes him a martyr.
If you want to know what real censorship looks like, let me show you what has been happening on the other side of the fence. Scientists whose research demonstrates that climate change is taking place have been repeatedly threatened and silenced and their findings edited or suppressed.
The Union of Concerned Scientists found that 58% of the 279 climate scientists working at federal agencies in the US who responded to its survey reported that they had experienced one of the following constraints: 1. Pressure to eliminate the words “climate change”, “global warming”, or other similar terms from their communications; 2. Editing of scientific reports by their superiors that “changed the meaning of scientific findings”; 3. Statements by officials at their agencies that misrepresented their findings; 4. The disappearance or unusual delay of websites, reports, or other science-based materials relating to climate; 5. New or unusual administrative requirements that impair climate-related work; 6. Situations in which scientists have actively objected to, resigned from, or removed themselves from a project because of pressure to change scientific findings. They reported 435 incidents of political interference over the past five years.
In 2003, the White House gutted the climate-change section of a report by the Environmental Protection Agency. It deleted references to studies showing that global warming is caused by manmade emissions. It added a reference to a study, partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, that suggested that temperatures are not rising. Eventually the agency decided to drop the section altogether.
After Thomas Knutson at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a paper in 2004 linking rising emissions with more intense tropical cyclones, he was blocked by his superiors from speaking to the media. He agreed to one request to appear on MSNBC, but a public affairs officer at NOAA rang the station and said that Knutson was “too tired” to conduct the interview. The official explained to him that the “White House said no”. All media inquiries were to be routed instead to a scientist who believed there was no connection between global warming and hurricanes.
Last year Nasa’s top climate scientist, James Hansen, reported that his bosses were trying to censor his lectures, papers and web postings. He was told by Nasa’s PR officials that there would be “dire consequences” if he continued to call for rapid reductions in greenhouse gases.
Last month, the Alaskan branch of the US fish and wildlife service told its scientists that anyone travelling to the Arctic must understand “the administration’s position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues”.
At hearings in the US Congress three weeks ago, Philip Cooney, a former White House aide who had previously worked at the American Petroleum Institute, admitted he had made hundreds of changes to government reports about climate change on behalf of the Bush administration. Though not a scientist, he had struck out evidence that glaciers were retreating and inserted phrases suggesting that there was serious scientific doubt about global warming.
The guardians of free speech in Britain aren’t above attempting a little suppression, either. The Guardian and I have now received several letters from the climate sceptic Viscount Monckton threatening us with libel proceedings after I challenged his claims about climate science. On two of these occasions he has demanded that articles are removed from the internet. Monckton is the man who wrote to Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, claiming that their letter to ExxonMobil offends the corporation’s “right of free speech”.
After Martin Durkin’s film was broadcast, one of the scientists it featured, Professor Carl Wunsch, complained that his views on climate change had been misrepresented. He says he has received a legal letter from Durkin’s production company, Wag TV, threatening to sue him for defamation unless he agrees to make a public statement that he was neither misrepresented nor misled.
Would it be terribly impolite to suggest that when such people complain of censorship, a certain amount of projection is taking place?
Source: Guardian Unlimited
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April 18th, 2007
Starbucks and Global Green USA have teamed up to
encourage individuals to “click, play and learn” about global climate change
and smart solutions with the launch of Planet Green Game. Through the online
game — located at www.planetgreengame.com — players can explore a virtual
world and learn how everyday decisions by individuals, cities, schools and
businesses can impact the climate and environment. The game offers real-world
examples of how individuals can change their own behavior and also influence
the actions of community, political and corporate leaders to engage in the
effort to stop global warming.
“We hope Planet Green Game illuminates the climate issue for players and
inspires them to be part of the solution through simple changes to their
everyday decisions,” said Ben Packard, director of Environmental Affairs for
Starbucks. “As one of Starbucks many environmental efforts, Planet Green Game
reflects our commitment to contributing positively to the environment and we
hope our customers will learn what they can do to help.”
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April 18th, 2007
Like an adult who can’t come to grips with the notion that Santa Claus isn’t real, it must be tough to still deny the existence of global warming. After all, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just declared with 90 percent certainty that greenhouse gases are largely responsible for heating the planet. The White House didn’t even try to deny or push back against the report. Al Gore’s slide show just won an Oscar. Even TV preacher Pat Robertson concedes that global warming in undeniable — and when it comes to modern science, Robertson isn’t exactly progressive.
So, what’s a group like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) to do? You remember CEI — it’s the group funded by ExxonMobil to confuse Americans about the evidence on climate change. CEI backed into the comedic hall of fame last year when, in an effort to undercut the message of An Inconvenient Truth, the group aired minute-long commercials about the wonders of carbon dioxide. The tagline: “They call it pollution … we call it life.”
Having lost the debate, CEI is learning to adapt, in part by pretending to shift to the left. Brad Plumer explains.
Although there are still plenty of unabashed global-warming deniers out there…many skeptics are now coalescing around a more moderate-sounding approach. [The group’s director of energy and global warming policy, Myron Ebell] insists that neither he nor his colleagues dispute the fact of global warming as they once did. “We try to react to the scientific research that comes out–and we’ve adjusted our political rhetoric as well,” he says. And adjust they have, developing a new line that goes something like this: Sure, we’ll accept that global warming is occurring and humans bear some responsibility. But it’s hard to predict exactly how bad a warmer world will be. And the proposals for reducing emissions in the United States are all costly and rife with problems. And, even if they could work, we can’t stop climate change because it’s impossible to convince India and China to curb their rapidly growing emissions. And so on.
One tactic that lately seems to give deniers special pleasure is mounting their case against the global-warming consensus from the left. So you get the odd spectacle of Smith going before the Senate to denounce cap-and-trade–the widely endorsed idea that the government should set a national ceiling on carbon emissions and then allow companies to buy and sell pollution credits–on populist grounds. “The corporations we see baying for a cap-and-trade program are out to enrich themselves without thought for the poor,” he told Congress. (He even pointed out that–horror–Enron had once supported the idea.) Or you get conservative Senator James Inhofe referring to companies that would benefit from a cap-and-trade regime as “climate profiteers.” Or Paul Driessen–the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death–saying things like, “It’s incredibly patronizing and colonialistic to tell Africa you can’t develop because we’re concerned about global warming,” while arguing that funding the fight against global warming “takes money away from spending on malaria.”
Yes, the ExxonMobil-funded conservative policy shop now feels justified lecturing others on colonialism and the plight of developing nations in Africa. You’re persuaded, aren’t you?
Of course, it’s just as bad on Capitol Hill, where only 13% of Republicans believe that global warming has been proven — a number that’s been going down, not up, as the evidence grows more overwhelming. And why is that? Jonathan Chait took a stab at explaining the depressing dynamic of why conservatives and their lawmakers resist.
The truth is more complicated — and more depressing: A small number of hard-core ideologues (some, but not all, industry shills) have led the thinking for the whole conservative movement.
Your typical conservative has little interest in the issue. Of course, neither does the average nonconservative. But we nonconservatives tend to defer to mainstream scientific wisdom. Conservatives defer to a tiny handful of renegade scientists who reject the overwhelming professional consensus.
National Review magazine, with its popular website, is a perfect example. It has a blog dedicated to casting doubt on global warming, or solutions to global warming, or anybody who advocates a solution. Its title is “Planet Gore.” The psychology at work here is pretty clear: Your average conservative may not know anything about climate science, but conservatives do know they hate Al Gore. So, hold up Gore as a hate figure and conservatives will let that dictate their thinking on the issue. […]
The phenomenon here is that a tiny number of influential conservative figures set the party line; dissenters are marginalized, and the rank and file go along with it. No doubt something like this happens on the Democratic side pretty often too. It’s just rare to find the phenomenon occurring in such a blatant way.
No, conservatives are just special this way.
Source: The Carpetbagger Report
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April 18th, 2007
When using an oven, minimize door opening while it is in use; it reduces oven temperature by 25 to 30 every time you open the door.
