{"id":3414,"date":"2009-02-16T09:49:58","date_gmt":"2009-02-16T09:49:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/02\/16\/global-warming-at-boskone-not\/"},"modified":"2009-02-16T09:49:58","modified_gmt":"2009-02-16T09:49:58","slug":"global-warming-at-boskone-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/02\/16\/global-warming-at-boskone-not\/","title":{"rendered":"Global Warming at Boskone: Not That Awful"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sunday morning at Boskone, I moderated a panel on “Global Warming: Facts and Myths, (and all that jazz)”, featuring James Morrow, Mark Olson, and Vince Docherty. As noted previously<\/a>, I was a little worried that this would turn out to be absolutely awful in one of a couple of obvious ways, but it wound up being pretty good, all things considered.<\/p>\n

The panelists were all pretty much on board with my request to try to keep from being soul-crushingly depressing, and a lot of the discussion focused on things that can be done to mitigate the worst effects of global warming. The whole thing was reasonably upbeat, as global warming discussions go.<\/p>\n

We were, alas, graced with the presence of a couple of people spouting bog standard denialist arguments. Had I been more awake, I probably would’ve said something really snarky to to woman who trotted out “Mars and Jupiter are warming, too, are we going to restrict the activities of the Jovians?” As it was, I was coming down with a cold (which has totally destroyed my voice today), and I just stared at her incredulously. At another point, I did cut somebody off by saying “The fact is, there is not a single scientist with any credibility who believes that human activity is not a major contributor to global warming.<\/p>\n

The other panelists were smart and eloquent in presenting their arguments, and Vince came armed with a bunch of PowerPoint slides containing potentially useful data. James Morrow also had extensive notes, but we went off in a different direction than what he had written down (unfortunately, because he had some good stuff). He did make an impassioned argument for re-thinking what we mean when we talk about quality of life to be less centered on the consumption of fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

There probably wasn’t anything in the discussion that would’ve surprised anybody who closely follows the global warming debate, but it went pretty well, all things considered. Vince had a closing comment that I really liked, noting that most of the solutions to the problem that turn up in SF going back twenty or thirty years involve utopian one-world-government type arrangements. We don’t have that, obviously, but he pointed out that even absent the utopian world government, a serious conversation about what to do about global warming is taking place all around the world, and that’s probably an encouraging sign.<\/p>\n

(I should note that somebody was videotaping the panel. If the video turns up on the web, I’ll post a link to it.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sunday morning at Boskone, I moderated a panel on “Global Warming: Facts and Myths, (and all that jazz)”, featuring James Morrow, Mark Olson, and Vince Docherty. As noted previously, I was a little worried that this would turn out to be absolutely awful in one of a couple of obvious ways, but it wound up… Continue reading Global Warming at Boskone: Not That Awful<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,11,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-science","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}