You Can Still See the Cosmos Episode That Is Turning Deniers Into Believers

Because it's available online for the next 37 days.

Brad Friedman:

It's not really a question of whether one "believes" in man-made global warming or not. As astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the host of the fantastic revival of Carl Sagan's COSMOS: A Spacetime Odyssey on the Fox Network explained recently to Stephen Colbert, science is "true whether or not you believe in it. That's why it works."

Nonetheless, helping to shake those who have been long conned by the fossil fuel industry's extraordinary propaganda effort to hoax the public about the issue can only help to continue moving the needle towards the serious action we must now take to mitigate the worst of the global warming crisis.

To that end, this past Sunday's episode of COSMOS seems to have done the trick, for at least some previous "deniers", at least according to this private note sent to me from a colleague of mine:

You've never heard me talk like this. Last nights cosmos was the most compelling case for #climatechange I've ever seen. I am now more of a believer than I ever was previously. I guess it is fair to say I am no longer a climate denier. We need change, and solar has to be the solution.

High praise. And, now that I've seen the full episode as well, I'd concur that it is one of the clearest, smartest, most-accessible explanations of the undeniable mountains of scientific evidence for the explosion of CO2 emissions --- and the unspeakable dangers it poses to mankind --- that I've seen to date.

If you haven't watched the episode, you should. You should also let your climate denying friends know about it. It just may help to shake them out of their Big Carbon-induced stupor as well.

I'm not able to embed the episode here, unfortunately, but you can watch the entire climate change episode here for the next 38 days. (It's the one called "World Set Free".)

I hope you'll consider doing so, and I hope that Fox, or the individual producers of the series, will make this important episode available to all for much longer than just 38 days! Yes, it's that important.

Creationists Should Ask NDGT to Ignore Them

It is a testament to freakazoids' blindness to reality that they still don't understand that the more publicity they get, the more they are exposed as delusional shitheads.
Think Progress:

Actually, Tyson is deliberately and straightforwardly giving a whole lot of time to creationism. Why did we have to sit through the history of the eyeball? Creationists love to argue that the complexity of the eyeball disproves evolution. Note how he talked specifically about how the eyeball isn’t actually this perfect mechanism, but something that works well enough for what we need it for, but not as well as it does in fish — the whole idea that the eyeball is a perfect, too-complex thing is a creationist argument.
Another example: Why did Tyson spend so much time explaining the similarities and differences in how polar bears have evolved through natural selection vs. how dogs have changed in the time we’ve been breeding them for certain traits? Because creationists acknowledge that changes within species happen. They just like to pretend like one kind of organism couldn’t really have brought forth another kind of organism.
Tyson isn’t ignoring creationism. Creationists wish Tyson were ignoring creationism. Tyson is instead standing on creationism’s home turf and playing by their rules. (Every episode we’ve seen so far has contrasted the Church’s approach to these issues with science’s approach. I’ve read some complaints that Cosmos is too much in love with that old story where everything happens in Europe until white people arrive in the Americas and then some stuff gets to happen here too. But I think that complaint also misunderstands that the history of Christianity as its taught to American Christians is, by and large, that story — everything happens in Europe until some stuff starts to happen here). Tyson is taking creationists’ claims deadly seriously, and showing all the ways they’re wrong.
I mean, people, he literally said “This is the greatest story ever told” — about science! You think Tyson doesn’t know that’s practically American Christianity’s slogan? I don’t know what more he could do to make it clear that he’s directly critiquing creationism. Is he supposed to come out and say, “Excuse me, Danny Faulkner, I’m talking to you.”?
If the ways he’s critiquing creationism weren’t so interesting, his focus on just going through their arguments, dismantling them one after the other, would be tedious. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is an incredibly thorough discussion of creationism. Creationists are getting the discussion they claim to wish to be having.
What creationists are upset about is that it’s not a discussion that bothers to treat their ideas like they have any scientific merit. After all, any good scientific question should eventually lead to an answer that generates more questions. Creationism short-circuits that process, instead arguing that there’s an end to questions — that, eventually, you can drill down enough to get to God — God did it or God willed it to be. No more questions needed.
That just can’t be a valid scientific approach. And, so far, week after week, that’s been the subtext to Cosmos.

Equal Time on Cosmos

Divine Irony: