Global Warming Contest

[KimbaWLion]

I don't know why I should be surprised about the global warming animation contest; the propaganda machine has been in high gear for some time now. I'm just sorry to see more people get sucked into it.

[athena]

I don't know why I should be surprised about the global warming animation contest; the propaganda machine has been in high gear for some time now. I'm just sorry to see more people get sucked into it.

Which propoganda machine would this be?



...btw, if you're about to take an anti-global warming stance I would advise you that I'm the daughter of an environmentalist and someone who had been doing research in the area for almost 30 years... not that I don't mind a good discussion, just that this is an area I feel quite strongly about.

[KimbaWLion]

Which propoganda machine would this be?The one that's hijacked the idea for political gain. The one that gives us TV series that present nothing but guesses about the future masquerading as scientific facts. And now we'll have cartoons, produced by people with no credentials in the field of climatology, spreading fiction even further. One basic tenet of propaganda is that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. This is a subject on which the experts are deeply divided, so the general public is being manipulated by one side to create a desired end.

[athena]

One basic tenet of propaganda is that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.

Okay, if we're going to have this discussion, you have to back up...

The global climate change issue comes down to two basic sticking points--two "lies"... either 1) you don't believe the earth is in fact heating up... or 2) you don't believe that the addition of carbon dioxide from human activity is causing climate change.

Addressing #1 ...
- the 10 hottest years on record globally have occurred within the last 14 years

- glaciers that have been around since the last ice age or either vastly reduced or gone

- buildings in the far north with foundations that were once rooted in permafrost are being destroyed because the permafrost has melted. Same deal for good chunks of the Alaska pipeline.

- the Amazon rainforest is now becoming susceptible to forest fire because it's too dry... parts of the Amazon river have been drying up as well leaving trails of dead fish in their wake

- an increase in hurricane frequency and intensity all over the world--the result of the oceans getting warmer and supplying more energy to the atmospheric cycle

... is it getting hotter? yes.
And if someone says it's only a degree or two... that's true, but not quite. If the temperature goes up on average of 1 degree at the equator, it can go up 12 degrees at the poles--which is why we're getting the big meltdown...

This stuff is not rocket science--this is measuring temperatures and noting large bodies of water or ice that are simply not there anymore.


Addressing #2: Is it the result of people?
- The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been tracked in a variety of ways... the first time it was done in relation to climate change was back in the 1950s, I believe... which is when they discovered the correlation between the amount of CO2 and temperature.

- Using ice core samples from places like Antarctica we have a means of tracking the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as well as the temperature at the time going back about 650,000 years. This has been used to confirm the correlation back through that entire time period.

- While there are those that argue that the majority of CO2 is produced by mother nature--which is still true--we are now a significant contributor. Quite simply, there has never been this much CO2 in the atmosphere. The problem is not really the human activity, just that our contribution is creating a kind of "tipping point" effect... increased heat causes polar caps to melt, causes permafrost to release more C02, causes rainforest fires, causes more heat... causes more melting... etc.


This is a subject on which the experts are deeply divided, so the general public is being manipulated by one side to create a desired end.

Point me to an expert that is actually saying they don't believe climate change is happening and/or it is being caused by human activity.

This deeply divided business is something that has been put out by the politicians... I have seen no evidence of a division and substantial evidence that people are coming around to the belief that human-caused climate change is real... eg. the recent UN report on the subject that was the most strongly worded consensus piece to date...


The one that's hijacked the idea for political gain.

Yes, it is. Although, you have to ask the question, exactly who has the most to lose here? I can understand why corporations and governments would want to hijack an anti-global warming agenda... they potentially have the most to lose... but what exactly does the environmental lobby get out of it?

And even if you simply take climate change out of the equation, we can't keep burning fossil fuel forever... it's a non-renewable resource... once it's gone, it's GONE... and then what will we as a civilization do? Oil? Gasoline? Plastics? We'd be all kinds of screwed.


The one that gives us TV series that present nothing but guesses about the future masquerading as scientific facts.

The scientific facts have changed very little in the past 30 years. It may have been guesses back in the 60s, but there are very few places in the world that you can go without running into hard evidence of climate change.

Where I live, we call it the "pine beetle"... in my province, British Columbia, our biggest industry is forestry... but the trees are being ravaged by these tiny little bugs that get under the bark... they turn the wood blueish on the inside before killing the tree. This is the area currently being affected (http://mpb.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/map_e.html) by the pine beetle in BC...

What does this have to do with global warming? The pine beetle is a natural critter in BC's forest, but it was always kept under control in the past because the winters here would go into deep freeze for a few weeks and kill most of them... we haven't had that kind of winter in probably over a decade... so every year, they spread further and further.


Personally, I don't give a damn about the 'propoganda'... which political pundit is saying what this week or what scientific theory is being debated... it doesn't matter because all I have to do is look outside my window to know that this is happening and it's real.

[athena]

In case you are wondering, KimbaWLion was not "banned" because of an opposing viewpoint on global warming... that would be, well... extremely silly given that this is an animation site.


I was forced to ban his account because he chose to delete the contents of all his reviews without warning for reasons which I really can't fathom. Keyframe policy has always been that such an action is an abuse of the "edit review" function and I have now been forced to remove those reviews and star-ratings entirely... which means that the Top 5 system is currently off-kilter until I can get a chance to reset it.

I wish I had learned this had happened before I composed that huge long message, but hopefully someone will find the above interesting.

[lupercal]

To be honest, I had a problem with this competition. I had the problem before any of this stuff blew up, and was nearly going to write something about it then.

For the record, I am ignoring everything below this post. I'm trying to pretend it doesn't exist. If my opinions co-incide with either KimbaWLion's or Athena's at any point it is purely due to coinicidence. That's the truth, and you can believe it or not.

--

I have a problem with the whole concept of the global warming competition. It has nothing to do with whether global warming is actually happening, or why - but, for the record, I do believe it is happening, and I strongly suspect it is due to human influence.

Why? Because the overwhelming preponderance of scientists think so, and scientists are generally not nitwits who just go along with what they read in The National Enquirer or The Sun or whatever. That isn't to say 'science' hasn't been wrong before, or even that it's not wrong about this, but from where I sit, when the majority of scientists agree about something, it's more likely to be right than wrong. That's because I trust science to be right more often than wrong.

Now, the REASON I believe this, is that I believe scientists are un-biased and 'scientific' in their work, regardless of whether it reflects popular cultural attitudes or not. For example, few scientists would agree that fossils were put here by Satan to trick us into not believing in evolution, but a not inconsiderable percentage of the general population believe that.

So, what is my problem with the competition?

In 1994 I applied for an Arts Grant, and then got down to the bit where they said which topics were more likely to more sucessful in their application. This got me fuming. How can you ostensibly encourage independant thought and creativity, and at the same time more or less tell artists what they should be artistic about, and what attitude they should have to the subject matter? How is this encouraging creativity? It's merely encouraging conformity to whichever line the government of the day (or whoever is doling out the money) were putting forth.

Now, here we have a competition whose topic is global warming. The subtext of this competition is that you must write something which underlines the pro-global warming argument if you want to win. Does anyone honestly think that someone could make a masterpiece of animation, which put forward the argument that global warming was a load of old rubbish, and stand a hope in Hell of winning this competition? Of course not. They want you to write Fern Gully part 23.

I'm sorry, but this sort of thing makes me angry. If you want to encourage creativity, that's great - but DON'T TELL PEOPLE WHAT TO THINK.

Why? Because, aesthetic and artistic considerations aside, I may not trust the next generation of scientists as much.

Loop

[athena]

I'm sorry, but this sort of thing makes me angry. If you want to encourage creativity, that's great - but DON'T TELL PEOPLE WHAT TO THINK.

Okay, this to me is a perfectly valid argument... and honestly, something I can relate to quite well as a Canadian artist. Because our country is situated so close the greatest producer of cultural products in the world, our government has a number of funding bodies designed to aid Canadian authors, writers, filmmakers, artists and so on...

Who gets funding? Well, since the money is ostensibly for ensuring Canadian productions not be overwhelmed by American values, then the funding should go to productions that demonstrate Canadian values and culture.

And now, for the 60 million dollar question... what constitutes Canadian values and culture??

So yea, if you want to make write an adventure novel about the life and times of Louis Riel--hey, we might have funding for you.

If however, you're like me and writing a basic fantasy novel then... well, let's say the likelihood of me ever getting a Canada Council Grant would be slim to none.


So yea, I do agree with you on that point... I will, however admit some bias on the subject matter since it is something that I believe very strongly in. Part of the reason I do what I do and have the skill set and education that I have--including, among other things, a BA in Media Studies--is because I believe in the power of artists as communicators if important messages... that, when the values align, we should be using our skills to impact people in a way that the talking heads on TV perhaps can't.

Anyways, it's not my contest and I posted it to news as purely an "Of Interest" to those whose values actually do align on the subject... it probably wouldn't stand out quite as much on Keyframe if we didn't post our news so rarely...