Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptic's Position
Once upon a time, Al Gore had a PowerPoint deck. Several years ago, I came to the conclusion that Gore's presentation was deeply flawed, so I made my own PowerPoint deck in response, and have been updating it ever since. Here is the most recent version (UPDATE: Links Fixed)
Then, Al Gore made a movie from his PowerPoint deck. He won an Oscar and a Nobel prize for his movie. Those are a bit out of my reach, so I will have to settle for actually being right. My previous movie showed my PowerPoint deck presented to a live audience, and can still be found online here. I felt the sound quality could be improved and the narration could be tighter, so I went into the "studio" to create a tighter version. The product of this is what I believe to be my best effort yet at explaining, in a comprehensive but simple manner, the science of the skeptic's position to laymen.
I have become a big fan of Vimeo because I don't have to break videos up into 10-minute chunks as on YouTube. The Vimeo version is here and is embedded below:
Other Viewing Options
When I get the time to break this into 9(!) parts, I will post a link here to YouTube.
You can download the 212MB .wmv file here (link on the lower right). Alternatively, it can also be found here. The .wmv is also available via BitTorrent: You can find its page at or the torrent directly .
Download the .iso file (DVD disk image) to make you own playable DVD here (beware: 1.6GB). A free tool to burn the DVD from the image is ImgBurn
The .iso file is also available via BitTorrent: you can find its page at with the torrent .
Finally, you can buy the DVD at cost, here, for $7.50 plus shipping.
Mark:
Thanks for posting this. I'm getting a 404 error when I try to download the .pdf. Is there a problem with the link?
January 26, 2010, 11:37 amKnucklehead:
404 happens for both ppt and pdf
January 26, 2010, 1:56 pmBen:
I can download the .ppt (haven't tried the pdf) but it's just a one-page file with what seems to be some sort of default placeholder graphic (a little robot?)
January 26, 2010, 10:12 pmSEO æˆæžœå ±é…¬:
Catastrophe Denied, fantastic!
Impossible is nothing on science...
January 27, 2010, 5:20 amSteve:
Your presentation is very thorough. Having read your blog for years, many of the points weren't new to me, but it's nice to have them all in one place.
Have you received any responses from people who disagree with you? I'd guess that if you got any attention, the alarmists would dub you a "denialist" and attempt to marginalize you.
January 27, 2010, 4:05 pmrandom observer:
Nice presentation.
There is a typo on page 51 of the PDF file. "ghe" should be "the".
January 27, 2010, 5:05 pmme:
This is a brilliant presentation, not only from a content perspective (which, arguably, is the most important part), but also from a production standpoint. I'd be happy to see it run on TV.
Thank you Coyote, for contributing to the to the sum total of accessible human knowledge in an area that particularly needed this kind of attention!
January 29, 2010, 10:07 pm