If you saw the Late Show with David Letterman last night and are visiting this website for the first time, please click here: “An Introduction to Climate Progress.”
For regular readers, yes, this is me with a ventriloquist’s dummy, but I can explain…
First off, it is now officially “Odd Day,” and everybody should do something odd to celebrate this rare occurrence:
For the mathematically challenged, Thursday’s date, 5/7/09, is one of only six this century that will feature three consecutive odd numbers.
Numbers lovers say the rare occurrence is an excuse to celebrate.
“The previous stretch of six dates like this started with 1/3/1905 — 13 months after the Wright Brothers’ flight,” said Ron Gordon, the Redwood City teacher who enthusiastically promotes these numerical holidays, like Square Root Day on 3/3/09.
Gordon is offering a prize of $579 to those who celebrate the date with the most zeal or who get the most people involved in an Odd Celebration.
So if you all do something odd and report your odd activity below, maybe I can get $579 and spend it on a Netbook. And no, I’m not being entirely serious here. Or am I?
For more on Odd Day, whose motto is “Be awed by the odd,” go to Oddday.net.
And no this segment wasn’t really filmed or even aired on Odd Day (on the East Coast at least). But it has been a lifelong ambition to be on the David Letterman show, so when they tracked me down through the Internet as a “climate expert” and asked me to come up to the American Museum of Natural History, I of course said yes.
The Letterman folk are very nice, including Kindler, no matter what his on-screen persona may seem. I am so naive that when I saw a somewhat odd-looking man carrying around a ventriloquist’s dummy, I was very puzzled. After several minutes, while waiting for the crew to set up, I asked him, “So, you are a ventriloquist?” And he said, “No, I’m the prop man.” And I’m still so naive that I still didn’t get what was going on until they gave me the dummy as they did in the segment.
So yes, very silly, but hey, they also made fun of RealClimate’s Gavin Schmidt — and he didn’t even get to plug his website or his new book in return!
I got to say the name ClimateProgress.org on the David Letterman Show, they actually showed the website name under my picture (which even 60 Minutes didn’t do), and I was featured as a climate change expert — what were the odds of that?
Happy Odd Day!
[And for the serious sticklers, the answer I gave to the question “if we don’t do anything about global warming, if we just let it go, tell me what’s going to happen” — which was “by the end of the century, much of United States will be 10 to 15°F warmer on average, from Kansas to California could be in permanent drought, could be turned into a desert [yes Dust Bowl would have been better] and the ocean could be turned into a hot acidic dead zone” [yes, I usually say “much of”] is a scientifically accurate statement if we don’t do anything. See “Yes, the science says on our current emissions path we are projected to warm most of U.S. 10 – 15°F by 2100, with sea level rise of 5 feet or more, and the SW will be a permanent Dust Bowl” and “An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water.“ Since the climate science deniers seem confused on this point, I’ll just repeat that if we don’t do anything about global warming pollution, then multiple analyses (IPCC, MIT, Hadley Center) now project a total warming by 2100 from preindustrial levels of 4.5°C to 5.5°C globally, which is to say 8°F to 10°F globally, which is to say roughly 11°F to more than 14°F over much of the inland United States, including Alaska. And that wouldn’t be odd or funny, but just plain tragic.]
