2011 Alliance for Earth Observations climate meet: Live updates - StormWatch 7 | WJLA.com
In a gloomy room below the streets of Capitol Hill, where cellphone signals get lost in the bedrock, scientists and policy makers have gathered to discuss the Future of the Planet. It's the 2011 Forum on Earth Observations, an annual meeting of the best and brightest minds involved in the climate-change debate. We're talking NOAA honchos, military generals, insurance wonks, NASA whizzes and Bill Nye the Science Guy. So, what's going on?
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3:15: More Landsate love/climate-skeptic hate coming from Marty Spitzer, director of U.S. climate policy for the World Wildlife Fund.
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Spitzer then goes off on skeptics, focusing on those who hold office.
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2:57: USAID's Batten is P.O.ed at people who buttonhole her and point out that it snowed a lot last year. “The environmental community made a choice to use 'global warming' to describe this phenomenon….But there are all sorts of other impacts, including local extreme snow effects, that can be attributed to a change in climate.”
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2:27: ... Says Kit Batten, climate-change coordinator for the U.S. Agency for International Development: “With this administration we’ve taken it to a new level...We’re no longer making climate change the purview of a few climate-change experts in the agency." All officials in the department are now expected to be up to date on the subject, she says, because USAID views reducing emissions and other mitigation efforts as "economic growth vehicles.”
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UPDATE 1:30 p.m.: Bill Nye the Science Guy is killing it as moderator at lunch. Menu: Caesar-like salad; some sort of squab with polenta and wine sauce; coffee/chocolate cheesecake; a glass of bile toward climate skeptics.
"Climate change is intrinsically connected to the weather we’ve been having," Nye says, although admitting that it's hard mathematically to connect 2011's record tornado outbreak with global warming. But it's "not rocket surgery, he says. "When you have 7 billion humans trying to drive to work you have the ability to change the climate.... We’re headed for a change, a huge change.” (Related: Is climate change becoming the new abortion debate?)
The Science Guy (real name: William) considers the skeptics the major problem in the ongoing debate. "It is much easier to tear things apart then build them.”
... Nye suggests the U.S. take a similar hard stance in psychologically conditioning people to think about climate change. Start early, he says, like in elementary school.
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