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.
Tag Archives: nature
Bold Scientists on YouTube
Now on YouTube, the first Bold Scientists video interview. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrErg0E56LE&feature=youtu.be.
Bold Scientists on Green Majority Radio
A feature interview on Green Majority Radio: Fresh from the New York City climate march, host Daryn Caister chats with Michael Riordon about Bold Scientists.
We range far and wide: science and scientists – bold and not, knowing our place (in nature), who owns knowledge, hubris and humility, power and resistance… Far and wide.
Hear it here: http://greenmajoritymedia.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/419-bold-scientists/.
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.
Michael Riordon 