Climategate Redux

Brace yourselves… BBC has the scoop.

Contents include more than 5,000 emails and other documents, some relating to work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

A similar release in 2009 triggered the “ClimateGate” affair and accusations of fraud that inquiries later dismissed.

Now, as then, the release comes shortly before the annual UN climate summit.

The university has yet to comment on the document cache, which is posted on a Russian server.

A text file included with the batch, apparently written by someone involved in the release and headed “FOIA 2011 – Background and Context”, reads: “‘One dollar can save a life’ – the opposite must also be true. “Poverty is a death sentence. Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”

Money

Worth paying attention to:

Money, in an unwieldy and impossible to read graph.

Geoengineering Trials

It will be interesting to see how this geoengineering trial goes. This is for the so-called SPICE trial:

FIELD trials for experiments to engineer the climate have begun. Next month a team of UK researchers will hoist one end of a 1-kilometre-long hose aloft using a balloon, then attempt to pump water up it and spray it into the atmosphere.

Naturally this all worries me, for reasons that I’ve tried to articulate in papers and here on this blog. See, for instance this and this.

Tiny

Christopher was a student of mine a few years back. Can’t wait to see the finished project. Looks awesome!

TINY: A Story About Living Small (Teaser Trailer) from TINY on Vimeo.

Sigh

Los Alamitos school board officials must now demonstrate that their climate change curriculum is balanced:

The high school will begin offering an advanced-placement environmental science course next fall. Based on demand elsewhere in California, district officials expect it to be popular—more than 15,000 public school students enrolled in the class in 2008-09.

Although there is a consensus among scientists, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that global climate change exists, the board of education said the topic is controversial enough to require a change in the district’s policy.

The new class will be the first for which district teachers must prove political balance to the school board.

Ethics, Policy, & Environment Vol 14, Issue 1

Our March issue is up. Check out the editorial by Andrew and me.

So very strange…

And kinda inappropriate, but if you’ve have some difficulty explaining Japan’s nuclear crisis to your five year old, here’s this fun video. (I’m only posting videos for the time being.)

Oh, and there’s also this nuclear timeline from Gizmodo.

Does science have all the answers?

Oxford scientist Prof Peter Atkins and philosopher Mary Midgley discuss whether there is anything more than facts, facts and more facts.

NYC

This Week in Viral Videos

Okay, they’re not exactly viral, but here are a bunch of moderately interesting viewing opportunities that have crossed my desk over the past few days. First up, many comedic sketches by the philosopher G.A. Cohen. Click here for many more. There seem to be over thirty:

Next, an interesting lecture on normativity by JJ Thomson:

Then it starts to get silly.

Here’s an ad for the city of Perth, where this out-and-out loser philosopher and dear friend lives.

Then there’s this wacky trailer for a Tamil action blockbuster, courtesy of Balloon Juice:

And finally, this, an announcement for a fiction book by the author Benjamin Hale, who is not me, but who grew up in the Boulder neighborhood in which I currently live. It actually likes like a great book. I’m excited to read it.