Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, was interviewed about his book last year by Naomi Oreskes, Director of the Science Studies and Professor in the Department of History at UC San Diego. The roughly 30-minute-long interview covers, like his book, such topics as stem cell research, evolution, global warming, and the concerted efforts by Republicans to ignore or distort science to serve their political and economic interests. The interview is a bit old (circa March 2006), but it is particularly relevant now that the political landscape has changed and Democrats have promised to make advances on many of these issues, particularly greenhouse gas emissions. A vote to end billions of dollars worth of subsidies for big oil companies and invest in renewable energy is currently scheduled for January 18 as part the House Democrats' First 100 Hours legislative agenda (see calendar after the jump).
In the interview, for example, Chris Mooney gives a good summary of the scientific consensus on global warming:
"I'm sure you've seen the detection and attribution studies where if you want to explain the temperature trends that we've seen, that if you just invoke natural causes it doesn't match very what we're seeing, but then if you blend together natural and human causes, human causes being greenhouse gas emissions, then sure enough we get a pretty good explanation of the temperature trend. And that is the consensus: that humans are causing a large part of the current spike in temperatures."
There are two links to the video. You can watch it on Google Video (preferred) or download it from the UCTV website (requires RealPlayer).
