Hmmm – I arrived home after a hard week of BIOL 2010 (PLANTS) lectures and more missed deadlines, to pick up the Globe and Mail Friday edition for a nice, relaxing read, when I suddenly sat up straight at Neil Reynolds’ Business section column – The mythical assertion of fossil fuel scarcity. It’s all about a recent article by Professor Emeritus Peter Odell, in the European Energy Review (I haven’t downloaded and read it yet, but I will).

“Wow!” I thought, “it kind of goes against everything that I have been reading about Peak Oil, for much of the last decade”, so it must be important. And then, I ask myself, who is this Odell? Quickly checking him on Google Scholar, I found that my academic work is cited more than his, and he’s 30 years older than I am.

From David Adam’s article about the CARMA International report, Western Media Coverage of Humanitarian Disasters, January 2006:

“The western media’s response to … humanitarian disasters is driven by “selfishness and egocentricity”…  Domestic politics, tourism and feel-good tales about western heroism and donations make a story… rather than human suffering.” The Guardian, 30 Jan. 2006

I had two thoughts yesterday morning, when I heard the CBC news reporting the devastating earthquake near Port-au-Prince. The first was about how limited the capacity of Haiti will be to respond to this disaster, given that it is one of poorest countries in the world. Haiti has one of the smallest per capita ecological footprints in the world, at just 0.5 ha per person. Compare this to a whopping 7.1 ha/person for the average Canadian. Yes, one average Canadian consumes the resources used by a total of 14 Haitians.

I started writing this blog post in June 2009, which was long before I found out that Lomborg was back on the public stage. In retropect, it’s interesting to see how my thinking was evolving. I was very cool with giving skeptics a fair hearing, and the tone is quite light. However, 6 months on, I am definitely feeling much less patient than I was back in the summer. How times change…

“My blog about animal rights activists‘ tendency to be as biased in their use of the peer-reviewed literature as climate change deniers got me thinking that I’d better pay some attention to both groups’ claims that the majority of scientists are actually biased against them.

In the case of animal rights activists, a recent court case about cormorants, upheld Parks Canada’s culling of cormorants on Middle Island to reduce mortality of the trees, plants and other animals.  Birders have striven to make the case that cormorant numbers were always really high, and that they should not be managed.  But there’s actually not a lot of evidence to support their position.

BY PROFESSOR STUART SCHOENFELD, CHAIR OF SOCIOLOGY, GLENDON COLLEGE, YORK UNIVERSITY ( schoenfe@yorku.ca)

From one perspective, the climate change conference in Copenhagen looks rational.  It’s about science – understanding the implications of the largest scientific project in history – and it’s about deliberation – well briefed representatives of 192 nations brought together to write an international treaty.  But the meeting is not so rational.  People come to the negotiating table not only with interests, but also with emotions.  The negotiators in Copenhagen represent some who feel entitled, others who feel resentful and yet others who feel powerless.  This play of emotions seems to be the story of the conference, a global summit of desires, fears, outrage and frustration.  Out of this mix of emotions, the challenge is to feel and act on the latent but powerful feeling of mutual responsibility.

The feelings of resentment and powerlessness come into focus when the feelings of entitlement are acknowledged.

Well, I was wrong, wrong, wrong, when I told several colleagues, some weeks ago, that the CRU (Climate Research Unit) at UEA (University of East Anglia) e-mail hacking incident was silly, and to ignore it.

It has not gone away, because climate-change deniers are fully invested in launching what appears to me to be an across-the-board attack on peer reviewed science. This has happened before, to whit, the lobbying for and subsequent removal of Robert Watson as Chair of IPCC (the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change).

How on earth should the scientific community respond? Well, I challenge everyone to hack into your own emails using terms such as “rejection”, “rejected”, “plagiarism”, “trick”, “fix” and see what emails you come up with. Then you can find incriminating phrases that can be taken out of context and used to self-smear your own integrity as a scientist.