Hello Ecolog - In March, one of the leading anti-minds of the Climate Deniers movement, Christopher Monckton, visited Union College. EOS, AGU's Newspaper, just published a Forum article describing our experience and that at our neighbor RPI. Subscription is required - http://www.agu.org/pubs/eos/ - but I've pasted the first two paragraphs below. Anyone interested can email me directly and I'll forward the pdf.
-Jeff Corbin Union College "In spite of the fact that 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field accept the basic tenets of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) findings (Anderegg et al. 2010), there is a consistent undercurrent of climate skepticism among the general public (Leiserowitz et al., 2011). To some extent, this skepticism is fueled by high profile speakers who offer "the real view" of climate science. Our campuses recently hosted two such speakers: Dr. Ivan Giaever at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Christopher Monckton (also known as Lord Monckton) at Union College. (Mr. Monckton's presentation can be seen at http://union.campusreform.org/group/blog/live-webinar-lord-monckton-at-union-college.) While the intention of such speakers is often to muddy the waters with respect to climate science (McCright and Dunlap, 2010), the effect at our campuses was to galvanize our students and colleagues to highlight the widely accepted facts of climate change and the nature of expert scientific consensus on this topic. This communication was achieved using social media and follow-up events that raised the profile of climate change discussions. These events proved to be so successful that we offer our experiences so that others can capitalize on similar visits by climate skeptics by converting them into "teachable moments."" *************************** Jeffrey D. Corbin Department of Biological Sciences Union College Schenectady, NY 12308 (518) 388-6097 ***************************
