Oh look, a soapbox.

[cherry]

Al Gore is a rock star. Seriously.



Couple of places he said things that jerked me out of the presentation, just because they're things that you really don't hear in Canada much -- religious references, a mention of "the evil of communism": hello, and welcome to Saskatchewan, land of medicare, co-ops, and credit unions.


Gore obvious cares deeply, and An Inconvenient Truth has been incredibly effective at bringing some sense of the scope of the issue of climate change to the masses.

I don't talk too terribly much about politics in this journal. I'm aware that my beliefs are not those of others, and that my academic background and social backgrounds have given me rather strong predispositions on a number of issues. Climate change, however, happens to be one of my hot-button issues. Climate change, global poverty reduction, and social equality, but I digress.

I had to write a neutral paper on climate change earlier in the year. It was difficult not because of my personal bias, but because I decided early on to limit myself to scientific papers -- to peer reviewed journal articles. For those not familiar with the process, it basically means that a group of academic peers have refereed the paper, and that it is reliable.

This became a problem, because there are no peer reviewed articles that dispute human influence on climate change. There was a paper in Nature (Oreskes, 2004) which surveyed almost a thousand (928, to be precise) abstracts in the ISI database with the keyword "climate change." Of these, 75% expressly or implicitly endorsed what has become the scientific consensus amongst those whose expertise is relevant: climate change has been directly, and dramatically, impacted by human involvement. The debate is in the media.

No one is saying that Milankovitch cycles aren't real, or that rotational wobble and axial tilt don't influence climate. 600,000 years of ice cores, however, say that there has never been as great an increase in temperature in as short of time. 600,000 years of ice cores shows a correlational relationship between CO2 and temperature. While this relationship between greenhouse gases and climate change is defined as correlational and not causational, the same is true of smoking and cancer -- and to ignore either would be incredibly foolhardy.


/soapbox

Oooh, and the lovely sprat vgifted me with a planted tree! Yay! Thank you, hon.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_bounce_/]

Word. I wound up yelling at the newspaper this morning when our PM tried to claim that economic growth, not climate change is the biggest problem Australia is going to face in the next twenty years.

We're in the middle of the worst drought recorded over here. They're not going to allow any irrigation or stock watering in the murray-darling river basin next year if we don't get substantial rain, soon, which will, funilly enough, almost destroy most of the crops there - 40% of our food is grown there. In addition to the widespread social damage that another bad year is going to cause all over country south eastern Australia, it's going to have a really substantial impact on everything. Most of the resivors up there are either empty or vergin on empty and so are the dams. You can't claim climate change isn't a major issue, possibly the major issue to be dealt with at the moment and people claiming otherwise make me so angry. (Especially John Howard, who was claiming only six months ago that climate change was a myth and was part of the push to have the CSIRO not talk about climate change)

[cherryice.livejournal.com]

We have Conservatives in a minority government up here right now. Given, our right wingers are almost father left than many lefties in other nations, but. Our current environment minister is an uneducated tool. Our new green plan? Totally has loopholes for corporations. I very much want to inflict some damage on someone.

Right now, our province is experiencing catastrophic flooding in easter areas, drought in others, and fires in the north. My family are farmers. My home town was farmers and ranchers. The impact of climate change on global economy, on the global population (especially the poor) has incredible catastrophic potential, and the short-sightedness of many is absolutely staggering.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_bounce_/]

Yes! Which is why the environment minister needs to know what the hell he's talking about and know the impact half-hearted policies are going to have on people.