Al Gore’s Climate Reality group has a new series of easily accessible rebuttals to climate denial nonsense, bundled in a game-style web project that seems unique.
One of the more disturbing elements of misinformation is summarised by a pithy quote from Winston Churchill: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”. Even more perturbing is the fact that Churchill’s quote came before the Internet and the age of Twitter, when a lie can take wings in the time it takes to tap 140 characters. However, the Climate Reality Project have just released a new website Reality Drop, that hopes to give truth a leg up.
Here’s how it works: Reality Drop rounds up the latest climate news and lets users know where climate misinformation is posted. Then users can drop some reality into the conversation. Doing so earns them points, climbing the leaderboard and earning higher rank.
Reality Drop’s version is much cooler than anything I had in mind so perhaps it was for the best! The website provides several valuable features. It empowers people who are passionate about the climate issue by giving them a way to communicate the realities of climate change. It provides the facts in plain language. The social media aspect with points and ranking make the process interactive and engaging.
The website borrows much content from Skeptical Science’s rebuttals and acknowledge so on their About page (in fact, our content is creative commons licensed so all communicators are very welcome to use our rebuttals). If you peruse the climate myths at Reality Drop, you’ll see they’re sorted into a familiar taxonomy. The rebuttals to a specific myth sometimes include the more detailed SkS rebuttal. But importantly, each page also includes a short, plain English version of each rebuttal which is a valuable resource for people engaging with climate misinformation online.
While I’m grateful to Al Gore for bringing Climate Change information and the word itself into households round the world, his idea of how we ‘fix’ this issue is simply to use the same old system of Capitalism.
He promotes consumption, not reduction. We can all change our lightbulbs but we’re still buying a product that relies on environmental destruction to produce.
It’s NOT truly sustainable. None of the green ideas coming from the ever growing market based approached are sustainable. Not Wind, Not Solar, Not any combination so long as they rely on the hyper exploitation of natural capital.
So the Green Dream as it relates to us maintaining and growth, which is what Capitalism demands, is a myth.
Karla,
Thanks for articulating your objections to Al Gore’s cornucopian and therefore unrealistic solutions to the looming environmental collapse.
Taken to the extreme, I’m certain that the buildings in this CBS video all have the highest Chinese-equivalent of LEED ratings:
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2013/03/chinas-extreme-real-estate-bubble.html
But the extremity of the waste to create such “green” buildings is killing the environment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HePvTuATnjw
Capitalism is madness.
There’s an annoying design blunder of Reality Drop: It suggests a default comment when you click on a link.
Instead of writing their own comment, users can just accept the default. Some of the linked articles have lots of comments that all say exactly the same thing. Instead of dropping some reality into the debate, it becomes a spam machine.
The site is still a good idea, but that feature needs to be gone.
Btw, I forgot so say hello. Hello.
NOAA: Pumphandle 2012: Time history of atmospheric carbon dioxide
Time history of atmospheric carbon dioxide from 800,000 years before present until January, 2012. Recommend full screen/HD to read titles. See http://carbontracker.noaa.gov for more information on the global carbon cycle. Download the full-resolution version from ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/carbontracker/movies/pumphandle_2012.mp4.
Anyone who believe Al Gore has any credibility in the climate debate is truely dillusional
Wow, Edwin, 6 mistakes in 1 sentence! It’s “believes”, not “believe”; “truly” is not spelled “truely” and “delusional” is a defining quality of climate denying delayalists. “Dillusional” is a yogurt sauce with too much green herb, I think. Al Gore has tremendous credibility in the climate debate and the Nobel prize committee is only one group that thinks so. His many years of work on climate are admirable and his movie has virtually all been shown to be correct by more science. Anyone who believes it matters whether Al Gore is believed or not, is foolish at best, since Gore is not a scientist and not an organizer or activist leader, holds no public office or much of any power at all, except the power to tell the truth, which he does. And the biggest mistake of all is your thinking anyone is going to believe the silliness you’re spreading. Read the science. And check your facts.
Re: ““Dillusional” is a yogurt sauce with too much green herb”
I love dill. can I find dillusional on the same aisle as the dill pickles? 🙂
Wow – Edwin Crockford just got ‘dropped’, or ‘reality dropped’ or whatever it’s called. And, incidentally, he has a pretty cool name…