Thursday October 16, 7 pm
The Prince Edward County library
208 Main Street, Picton, Ontario.
The Picton launch of Bold Scientists.
You’re invited.
Great minds don’t think alike. They think differently.
Bring yours with you.
Here.
Category Archives: Scientific research
Bold Scientists @ Word on the Street
Photo: Brian Woods.
Bold Scientists (and the author) at work in the non-fiction reading tent, at the giant Toronto literary festival Word on the Street, Sunday September 21, 2014.
This was the book’s public debut.
Wild thunderstorms in the morning, then the clouds cleared, and throngs of people filled the streets around Queen’s Park in downtown Toronto. The reading tent was full.
I gabbed a little and read several pieces from the book, including – in honour of Sunday’s climate change marches around the world — two excerpts on scientists who challenge official silence and inertia on the urgent climate crisis we all face.
Next event: Thursday October 16, 7 pm, at the Picton Public Library, 208 Main Street in Picton, Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada.
Come along!
“They cannot stop me from talking.”
Scientists Biased, Talk Too Much: Confidential government memo.
Details here, in Blacklock’s Reporter: minding Ottawa’s business, August 11, 2014.
Tar sands, Alberta, Canada. Photo: The Nation.
The primary target of the confidential memo, John Smol, is a professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, a widely acclaimed paleolimnologist (fathoming the life stories of lakes), and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change.
Why does the Harper government want to silence John Smol and his co-researchers? Because they know too much. The current regime in Ottawa is an aggressive booster of the enormously destructive tar sands colossus, and is determined to keep Canadians strictly on message: tar sands = good for Canada, with minimal harm. Period. Trouble is, their message keeps getting shredded by the findings of honest science.
Why won’t John Smol shut up? He knows too much:
“The huge problem is that many environmental problems are long scale. They can take years, decades to show up – or longer, sometimes I work in centuries, even millennia. But politicians think in terms of four years, at best. Look at the tar sands – go ahead, pump it out as fast as you can, we’ll be out of here in four years, what do we care? Industry is even worse, they think in quarters, 90-day intervals. Costs for the future are horrendous, but they’re not in this fiscal cycle. When things go extinct, they’re extinct forever. You destroy a river system, it’s gone. Destroy a fish population, it’s gone. How do you gauge what that’s worth?”
Delve into John Smol’s research, paleolimnology, and why he speaks out, in Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science. Available September 4, 2014, in print and e-book from Between the Lines.
Weather report: no climate change.
Photo: National Geographic
This week in Canada, the Harper regime decreed:
Henceforth, there will be no talk of climate change from any meteorologist employed by the Canadian Meteorological Service (a division of Environment Canada).
Investigative reporter Mike De Souza revealed the new ban here.
A government official who is permitted to talk to the media – but not to say anything of substance – told De Souza that meteorologists are qualified to talk about extreme weather, but not climate.
The ban – officially known as a “communications protocol” – extends the Harper regime’s aggressive silencing of scientists whose research might provoke questions about the regime’s pro-corporate, anti-environment agenda. True to the most insidious forms of censorship, the boundaries of what’s forbidden are not specified.
Apparently this ongoing reign of terror works. De Souza reports that, since the government’s 2007 decree that all federal scientists must obtain management approval before giving any interviews on their research, an internal Environment Canada analysis noted an 80 per cent drop in media coverage of climate change issues.
Fortunately, scientists are resisting. Follow their stories in Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, autumn 2014 from Between the Lines.
Good news: The ELA is saved!
In April 2012, the government of Canada announced that it would close the world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) in northwest Ontario. Since 1968 the world-renowned research station has hosted a unique whole-ecosystem approach to studying how lake ecosystems and fish respond to human and natural disturbances. The resulting data, unattainable anywhere else, is essential for objective, evidence-based decision-making.
Within hours of the closure announcement, marine biology PhD candidate Diane Orihel launched an international campaign to save the ELA.
Two years later, victory! Today the grassroots Canadian organization Evidence for Democracy announced that a final agreement has just been reached to transfer operation of the ELA to the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), based in Manitoba. It will be backed by the governments of Ontario and Manitoba, which appear to be less hostile to evidence-based decisions and policies.
For more on the vital connections between science, evidence and democracy, Evidence for Democracy offers two public events:
5 pm, Thursday April 3, Dr. Munir Sheikh, former Chief Statistician of Canada, on why public policy needs to be informed by evidence. The event will be live streamed. Details here.
Governing in the Dark, a recent public talk by Canadian biologist Scott Findlay can be seen or read online, here.
In dark times, signs of hope.
Follow the Save ELA story in Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, coming from Between the Lines, autumn 2014.
Michael Riordon 