It’s interesting to contrast the way in which UC Berkeley (and the UC system) has handled Chancellor Birgeneau’s student protests (see a summary here) and the way in which the system (and then-President Dynes) handled similar incidents against then Chancellor Denton (see a summary here).
Synopsis of Copenhagen
Climate progress has a nice round up of Copenhagen talks.
Tidy List of What Aliens Are Doing to the Earth
From the National Wildlife Federation’s Dr. Amanda Staudt (full post),
While opponents want to draw attention to decade-old emails, here is what is happening right now to the planet:
Temperatures this decade have been higher than any other decade on record, and one degree (F) higher than average temperatures in the 20th century.
Ocean temperatures worldwide this summer were hotter than ever previously recorded.
Stable sea ice in the Arctic melted to its lowest recorded levels this summer, declining more than 60% since the 1980s and 1990s.
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere for 2009 (387 parts per million) are the highest they have been in about 15 million years.
Globally, 8.7 billion tons of carbon were emitted in 2008 from burning coal, oil and natural gas, a 41% increase from 1990.
Latest from the UK Met Office
Today BBC ran this article with this graph,
It’s worth noting that,
The WMO uses three temperature sets – one from the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and two from the US, maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) and the space agency Nasa.
Asked whether the controversy surrounding e-mails hacked from CRU could have any bearing on the results, Mr Jarraud replied that all three datasets showed the same result.
Vicky Pope from the UK Met Office made the same point: “The datasets are all independent, and they all show warming,” she said.
So much for that coolish year all the skeptics talk about.
We should have…
David Orr recently completed his last Conservation in Context column in Conservation Biology. I don’t know him and I’m not a conservationist biologist, but through the years I have frequently found myself reading his column. His last, and perhaps most poignant of those I’ve read, was just published. I quote a short section here,
“Furthermore, I think we should have learned to be more adept, personable, and creative in talking to the public and the guys down at the truck stop and the women working two jobs to make ends meet. I think we might have gone to fewer scientific conferences in exotic places and to more Rotary meetings and tedious city council sessions. We should have talked less often to ourselves in a scientific jargon and more often to the public and in the common tongue. And we should have mastered the art of persuasion on radio and television the way some others have.”
It’s never too late. Find time to give a talk to your local organization, at your child’s school and if you’re desperate (or crazy) or really, really brave, maybe even to Fox News. We have a lot of ground to recover.
For those of you who don’t have access to these journals, see here and please don’t tell Wiley.
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