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Monday 23 September 2013

Saving the Climate Commission's Resources

Update - The Climate Commission has been reborn as the crowd-funded 'Climate Council' - be sure to donate! They're already raised nearly $1,000,000
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Creating a disconnect between the views of scientific experts and the understanding of the general public is quite likely to make the world a significantly shittier place.

An unambiguous effort to widen this disconnected, with respect to climate science, has been Tony Abbott's recent move to scrap the Climate Commission, a body aimed at providing apolitical, scientific information on climate change to the public. From the Climate Commission's website:

"The Climate Commission was established to provide all Australians with an independent and reliable source of information about: the science of climate change, the international action being taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the economics of a carbon price."

If one really were to believe that the science of climate change is 'crap', axing any body that links the public to the views of scientific experts seems a logical way of preserving that belief.

Tim Flannery, Chief Commissioner of the Climate Commission, bore the brunt of criticism spawned from the climate skeptic movement
The news is sad, expected but most certainly not all doom and gloom. The CSIRO, universities and yet-to-be imagined groups communicating climate science could fill the gap, and perhaps exceed the capabilities of the Climate Commission. There's already a petition to create a 'citizen-funded' climate commission, here.

Meanwhile, the excellent resources made available on the Climate Commission website are still up, but it's unlikely they will be for long. The site is archived on The Wayback Machine, and on Pandora. I also downloaded a copy of the entire website - click here to grab a copy of the 229 megabyte zip file, which you can extract and browse offline at your leisure.

The Climate Commissions Youtube videos might not last long either, but they can't really be archived using services like Pandora or Wayback. So, I grabbed copies of the videos and uploaded them to a new channel, along with copies of the descriptions for the more popular videos (I disabled comments, because, 'why not tell louis armstrong to his face').

Without a strong connection to the view of actual climate scientists, the public will continue to accept the illusion of debate - a 'Manufactroversy' of serious consequence. This video explains why rejecting the view of a large number of experts on a particular science, whilst accepting the views of scientists in other fields, is relatively silly:



And here's the entire channel:

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