Quiks and Quarks did a nice job on global climate change

Quirks and Quarks is the CBC radio weekly science show that been around since 1988 (and to which I’ve been listening for about that long), today they did a great show on climate change. The climate change debate is tricky in the same way the evolution debate can be tricky: people say, ‘yeah, but what’s the evidence?’ and since there is typically no single study you can point to which conclusively proves it, and an unwieldy density and volume of studies that contribute to it’s proof, it’s hard to know what to say to that. On the show Quirks did a nice job of wading into that thorn bush by choosing a short selection of scientists to interview whose work is specifically indicative of the danger of global warming, and questioning them at a balanced level of specifics and overview. It highlighted the degree of detail in which the problem is being studied, and gave a feel for the combined strength of the evidence. It’s long past time to be having the “is global warming real” debate, but until we find better ways to articulate the argument that it is, we’re going to be stuck having it so it’s good to see people exploring ways to do it with integrity and effectiveness.

The whole show is available in entirety and segments, as streams or downloads, in MP3 or OGG (3 for 3 CBC, nice), on the show’s website:

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/05-06/dec03.html

And hell yeah, OGG isn’t necessarily dead. Long live OGG, long live Quirks and Quarks, and let’s all hope long live the global ecosystem.

1 comment:

Gentlemen:

A great topic for your program would be cars that run on tap water. I first noticed this in the early 70s when an editorial in Welding Production Engineering Journal cited two South African Engineers who had converted a car to run on water. Subsequently in the late 1980s I found Stan Meyer’s website. His dune buggy ran on water and though he was found to be guilty of fraud the circumstances were suspicious. Subsequently Daniel Dingle a former employee of NASA ran his car on water in the Phillipines for 30 years. More recently Denny Kline of Clearwater, Florida has intensified development of these cars. Genepex, a Japanese company, has a prototype on the roads. Recently a Sri Lankan student converted a car to run on water and drove it hudreds of kilometers on a litre of water. A company somewhere on the outskirts of Toronto called Rothman technologies is making further breakthroughs in this field. The list goes on and on so as a green technology and a cost saving technology why not do a piece on quiks and quarks. I’m sure those who are tired of paying 95 cents a litre for gasoline would find it fascinating.

leave a comment