not all the science in hollywood movies is bad

In today's Material World, Quentin Cooper discusses Hollywood and science with David Kirby, Lecturer in Science Communication at Manchester University and author of Lab Coats in Hollywood (2011).

Their pick of the Hollywood movies where the science is actually quite good includes Contact, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Beautiful Mind, Finding Nemo, Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff more ...

happening events

In her review of the TV series Sarah Palin's Alaska, Janet Malcolm, author of Reading Chekhov, makes this general remark about the surreal aspect of TV reality series.

Something always seems a little off in reality television. You don’t believe that what you are seeing happened in the way it is shown to have happened, any more than you think that the man in the Magritte was born with an apple attached to his face. more ...

classics and headlines

The Guardian theatre blog links to some recent posts we've done about Oedipus, Faust and Frankenstein.

the best art maintains its true relevance not by reacting quickly to the headlines, but by probing deeply into the fundamental things that make us human more ...

views of greenland: "like frazer in dad's army"

This is only the second time that the National Theatre has staged a play that addresses climate change. (The first time is here.)

The issue of climate change seems, almost invariably, to present theatre critics with an irreconcilable tension between the material and the form in which it is presented. Here's a selection from half-a-dozen first night reviews of Greenland.

"Like Frazer in Dad’s Army, Greenland repeatedly warns that we are doomed, and that unless we mend our ways, sharpish, it will serve us jolly well right."

"I care about the issues. But I couldn't give a damn about any of the multiply-authored characters."

"Greenland is not so much a play as a statement put out by a committee."

"The show starts with a big issue and then seeks ways to illustrate it. I suspect it would be more fruitful to take the more traditional route of beginning with characters and a situation and working outwards."

"The trouble with this sort of fact-into-fiction project is that the wholly commendable statements of the green movement wind up sounding gauche and laughable when transposed into drama."

"Thought-provoking debates will surely arise in the accompanying series of NT platform talks"

From Daily Telegraph, Independent, Observer, Guardian, London Evening Standard and Independent on Sunday

pic: John Laurie as Private James Frazer, the Scottish coffin maker, in "Dad's Army" more ...

since lunch

Overheard in the news room.

Reporter doing a phone interview: “Please slow down, professor. You’ve been researching this topic for a decade. I’ve been researching it since lunchtime.”

How blogs are changing science. more ...

the rally for sanity

'The battle for the American mind right now is between talk show hosts and comedians,' said a 26-year-old doctoral student from Richmond, Va. “I choose the comedians.” (Daily Dish more ...

irony of the age

Orville Schell reviews the latest literature on climate change:

it is one of the great ironies of our age that even in the midst of the “Information Technology Revolution,” which daily inundates us with vast quantities of information that are supposed to inform and liberate us, we are still unable to synthesize it so as to galvanize ourselves for action. more ...

attitude problem

What we know: climate change is happening, and human activity is driving it. As someone somewhere else has said, you can be intelligent and deny that, and you can honest and deny that, but you cannot be both.

But in the last few months the media has devoted huge attention to highlighting some mistakes in the vast amount of data that has appeared and in publicising some blatant misrepresentations of the science.

Now the media reports that there's been a shift in public attitudes about climate science. (And this, the hottest January on record.) There's a surprise. more ...

the switch in the last few months

After each edition of Radio 4's Today programme, the presenters reflect for a couple of minutes on how that edition went. This review is only available online.

The final item on today's programme was a discussion between Mike Hulme and Tony Juniper about the melting glaciers, the IPCC and the calls for Dr Pauchuri to resign.

The controversy over the melting glaciers - following, as it does, the hacked emails, the disappointment at Copenhagen, and the unusually cold winter - has provided climate contrarians with yet another talking point to hijack the debate.

In the review after the programme John Humphrys reflected that:

The whole climate change debate has really switched around over the past few months. A lot of people who were - I think this is fair to say - entirely persuaded of the argument are a bit dismayed (putting it mildly) at the way the argument is being called into question.

Not that they necessarily no longer believe that climate change is man-made, and the rest of it, but the debate is not going the way many people had expected, and hoped. more ...

when a sacred concept misleads

A new report published today on science journalism makes a point this blog keeps making about the BBC's misconceived idea of 'balance', so noticeable in Radio 4's Today and BBC2's Newsnight.

The report, titled Science and the Media: Securing the Future, points out that 'balance' is (in effect) unscientific:

A classic example of the disjuncture came with the issue of journalistic balance, a sacred concept in neutral, objective journalism but problematic for science. Tom Fielden, science editor of the Today programme (himself a former general news reporter), explained how interviews on Today are often grounded in the UK’s distinct form of adversarial politics where two sides are invited on to thrash out policy differences. However, applying this model of reporting to science stories like MMR and climate change has produced seriously misleading reporting. more ...

the snow job

A representative from a large ski company goes on The Weather Channel to give an upbeat account of widespread snow in Colorado.

A local reporter in the area writes that on his side of the Rockies it's warm, dry and sunny. He can't see any of this snow.

The ski company threatens to withdraw its advertising from the local paper. It doesn't have to. The reporter gets fired.

With its tension between the local tourism industry and the reporting of the facts, this reporter's story has shades of Dr Stockmann in Ibsen's Enemy of the People, telling the town that the water for the new public baths is poisoned, or the Roy Scheider character in Jaws, telling the citizens of the Amity beach resort that there's a man-eating shark in the area. No-one wants to know.

In another way, it reflects the mainstream media's support for big business over empirical evidence, reflected most conspicuously in its reporting of climate change. more ...

so that was 2009

This US diagram of the world's news shows that the most prominent topics included:

economic crisis, health care reform, Obama transition, Iran, auto industry collapse, US terrorism policies, swine flu, Michael Jackson death, Ted Kennedy death, Henry Louis Gates arrest, Fort Hood shootings, Pakistan, War in Gaza, Bernie Madoff and Somali Pilates.

As the NYT's Andy Revkin points out, where is climate? more ...

when the ducks go

One of the great TV series of the Noughties - some say the greatest series ever - opened with a man in New Jersey having panic attacks because a family of ducks had stopped visiting his pool.

It was one of the few moments in The Sopranos when the natural world got a look in. Other than that, the series was driven by an unquenchable human appetite for food, drink, drugs, cash, violence, food, and more food.

There was never any sense where this food came from. The closest viewers came to seeing a supply chain was a lorry full of frozen turkeys. The lifestyle led by the Soprano family - the spacious McMansion, the wife's limitless soft-pastel wardrobe - offered an eerily kitsch contrast to the raw violence that paid for it.

The Sopranos is not the first drama to use wild ducks as a metaphor for a denatured society. In Ibsen's Wild Duck, nature has been confined and sentimentalised in a loft. In the 86 episodes of The Sopranos, it is markedly absent. Very few animals feature at all. In one episode, Tony's nephew is so high that he falls asleep on top of his girlfriend's small dog and suffocates it.

Whatever time of day it is, it is always night-time at the Bada Bing strip-club. The outdoors scenes usually take place on golf courses. The yacht is really only another bedroom location for Tony. When two fairly tough characters find themselves lost in the woods on a freezing night (in the acclaimed Pine Barrens episode) they have no idea how to survive.

The series depicts a self-enclosed cycle of consumption and exploitation that's graphic testament to what Ted Hughes once called 'the flight from nature'. That mix of entitlement and disregard, so vivid in The Sopranos, has led to Copenhagen. more ...

twitter as good as today

The Today programme has been famously sneering about the vacuities of Twitter. But that in itself is just another news story it has missed. Here are five things this blog has learnt on Twitter this morning:

1. A new phrase: 'sustainable prosperity'. (ht: @drgrist)

2. The rate at which our footprint is growing: in 2006, the most recent year for which data is available, humanity’s footprint grew almost 2% from 2005, and 22% from a decade before. (ht: @EndOvershoot)

3. The rate of sea rise: a new study indicates sea rise rate tripled (ht: @tweetingdonal)

4. A new type of capitalism: a look into Monsanto's 'seed business' reveals what @stevesilberman calls 'DNA-based capitalism'. (ht: @Arch4HumanityND)

5. When it's darkest: tomorrow marks the earliest sunset for UK this year; although mornings get darker until January, it's now as dark as it gets pm. (ht: @AngusWillson @thegreatgar)

... and one great quote:

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. - Martin Luther King Jr. (ht: @robertiannone)

Would this blog have learnt as much listening to the Today programme? more ...

'surely unconscionable'

The Daily Telegraph carries a fair number of climate-sceptic columnists who are happy to advertise their lack of interest in science. Today one columnist writes: 'I have not so much as an O-level in physics or chemistry. All I do know is this ...'.

Another columnist writes grandly: 'And although I do not believe in climate-change catastrophe theory ...' as if it were a question of personal taste, like whether he preferred to take his holidays in Tuscany or the south of France.

But the paper's leading article today on Copenhagen is more thoughtful than you might expect from the articles that surround it:

Many of the proposals would be the right thing to do even without climate change: it is surely unconscionable, for example, for the current occupants of the Earth simply to continue extracting and exploiting a finite resource – such as fossil fuel – to the point of its depletion. more ...

free run with a non-scandal

Geoffrey Lean writes that environmental groups were unprepared for the swift boating of climate science:

From what has been publicized so far, there does not seem to be a great deal in the exposed messages, nothing that would remotely justify the widely touted claims that they prove that the whole edifice of global warming science to be a fraud. But the skeptics have had a free run with the non-scandal ...

Update: George Marshall made this swift boating point back on 22 Nov. (Thanks, CH.) more ...

not a smidgen of evidence

To be clear: many now are claiming, in effect, that the world's best scientists, thousands of them, who have contributed to framing the statements on global warming issued by our own and most other governments, the IPCC, National Academy of Sciences, Royal Society, American Physical Society, and on and on, have been engaged for many decades in a massive, secret conspiracy. I don't think the stolen emails and computer code provide a smidgen of evidence for that.

Spencer Weart, science historian
(Director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics, 1971-2009) more ...

believe the buildings

Archive on 4 considered Lord Clark, who wrote and presented the landmark BBC series Civilisation.

Five minutes in, Clark stands in front of Notre Dame and asks, 'what is civilisation'? He says he can't define it in the abstract ('yet'), but knows it when he sees it, and he can see it in front of him.

If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a minister of housing, or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings. more ...

no-one laughs at the comic

The last 10 years have all been in the top 15 hottest years ever. You can catch the section from Question Time, where Melanie Philipps argues that climate change is a scam and temperatures are going down, here. Fortunately, Marcus Brigstocke is on hand to talk some sense.

An odd situation: the audience greets the comments of a supposedly serious columnist with laughter and listens to the words of a comedian with serious attention. more ...

on air

Steve Waters' climate-change plays The Contingency Plan will be broadcast on Radio 3 on 13th December. more ...