"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Oresekes' History of Climate Denialism

Also via Quark Soup, an excellent video of a presentation by Naomi Oreskes; half about the early history of scientific concern about anthropogenic climate change (lots of new stuff to me there) and half about the history of the denial movement. It's an hour long, but I highly recommend finding the time to watch it.

Update: Atmoz also linked to this video. Check out caerbannog's comment there.

4 comments:

John Mashey said...

Did you happen to read Lubos Motl's comment on it in Quark Soup?

Anna Haynes said...

I sent the link to a retired engineer who's a doubter, and haven't heard back from him.
I like to think this means that the talk got through to him, but am curious - what is the response of other genuine (non-shill) doubters when they view the talk? Is this the way we can reach sincere people who've come down with "everything Al Gore knows is wrong" disease?

Michael Tobis said...

Heh!

No, John, I missed it. Thanks for pointing it out.

Lubos is a piece of work isn't he?

Interestingly he fits in the pattern Oreskes identifies of passionately anti-communist physicists without any serious training in climate being at the core of the denial movement.

John Mashey said...

Well, actually Motl may be more:

http://www.kolej.mff.cuni.cz/~lmotm275/
Which points at:
http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~motl/