Charlottesville makes Laurie David cry
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The woman who came up with the idea of sweetening sermons about global warming with free Sheryl Crow concerts apparently left the stage of the Pavilion last Thursday and burst into tears.
Laurie David, creator of Stop Global Warming, producer of the Al Gore hit, An Inconvenient Truth, and wife of Seinfeld/Curb Your Enthusiasm creator Larry David, writes “Social change is a journey” on the Huffington Post about her 20-minute talk at the “gorgeous Charlottesville pavilion” in front of “a couple of thousand slightly inebriated college men” waiting for the free Robert Randolph concert. Her buddy, Crow, was unable to make the Charlottesville stop.
“Out of the corner of my eye, I saw guys yawning. I heard kids saying, ‘Where’s the music? and I think I heard the ‘b’ word,” laments David. She rushed through her speech and off the stage before bursting into tears, “not because I took anything personally, but because it was so clear how much work is still to be done.”
Charlottesville-based climatologist Chip Knappenberger isn’t shedding any tears. “Your delivery was a cross between a stern lecture and a scold… neither of which is liable to be particularly effective to the demographic group that largely made up the attendance,” he tells David on the World Climate Report website. He offers suggestions for her script, which he calls “exaggerated” and riddled with “scientific inaccuracies.”
Crow joined up with David for an Earth Day tour finale at George Washington University on April 22, and the two managed to get into a dust-up with Karl Rove at the White House Correspondents Association dinner April 21, with Rove allegedly telling Crow, “Don’t touch me.”
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“I deigned to come all the way to the deep south and lecture the yokels and they were ever so mean to me!”
Geez. How obnoxious.
Almost as obnoxious as the other commenters on the blog post. I particularly would like to give this guy a smack in the back of the head:
“As someone who was born and raised in Charlottesville I am not surprised by the UVA students actions. The undergraduates are a pretty insufferable lot who regard themselves pretty highly. Don’t give up hope though, the graduate students are a compeletly different breed and many of them get it. I say this as someone who got my Masters at UVA (with a wonderful program and great fellow students) and had to deal with these kids daily. We used to joke about making t-shirts that said, “The University NOT The Attitude.” Keep up the great work!”
World Climate Report is Patrick Michaels’ publication. Remember Michaels? The guy who pretended to be the Virginia State Climatologist until Gov. Kaine made him stop? The guy who’s paid by the energy industry to say nice things about them? Yeah, that guy. World Climate Report was created by the Western Fuels Association.
So, just to be clear, you’re presenting the opinion of the energy industry — put out by a guy who believes that global warming doesn’t exist, thermometers be damned — and presenting it as a difference of opinion between climatologists. If you’re going to include this in your Thursday issue of the paper, I hope you’ll provide a more detailed picture of the World Climate Report and Mr. Knappenberger.
Other comments? Obnoxious? Freedom of the press won…they have been ‘erased.’
Global warming is a problem and must be addressed by everyone, government officials and individual citizens. I attended the Global Warming Event and wondered if Laurie David always acted as rude as she was on Thursday night. My assumption is that she is not that way, that UVA students were rude.
Waldo,
It is hard to see how there is a difference of opinion between climatologists here. One of us is a climatologist (that would be me) and the other is (according to Glamour magazine’s December 2006 “Women of the Year” issue…”a Hollywood producer and wife of comedian Larry David” (that would be Laurie David).
If you were at her presentation on Thursday, I’ll be glad to discuss the scientific accuracy of any topic that she brought up…as well as a few of the things that she didn’t have the heart to discuss.
And BTW, never, have either Pat Michaels, or myself, denied that human activities are warming the earth through an enhancement of the greenhouse effect. I, do, however, question what form the impacts will take, and the effectiveness of solutions to the “problem” such as unplugging your iPod or cell phone charger when not in use (as suggested by Ms. David) will have on global climate.
-Chip
I was at this disaster and have a couple of thoughts:
1) This event was touted in the media (or at least on the two radio stations I listen to) as “the Robert Randolf and the Family Band kicking off the C’ville Pavilion Season” oh and maybe a little something about the global warming tour. I think most people were expecting this to be primarily a fun musical event and if there were to be an educational component, it would be kept brief.
2) Laurie David is not a particularly dynamic speaker.
3) She did not walk off of the stage after 20 minutes, I was there at 7:25 expecting to hear some tunes and she started her talk about 10 minutes later. I left the venue at 8:15 when it seemed like there was no end in site. She may have ended soon thereafter, but she really went on and on and on to a crowd who had come out to hear a famous, upbeat band.
4) I consider myself to be environmentally responsible and so she was preaching to the choir as far as I was concerned, but my god woman, keep it short and to the point.
5) I do feel sorry for Ms. David and feel bad that she left with an unfavorable opinion of our fair city, but both she and the tour promoters would seem to share in some of the blame for that.
Hey liberal douchebags - global warming is another liberal fantasy designed in order to allow the libs to try and shame
the rest of us into being more regulated and taxed. What happened to that deep freeze these people predicted 40 years
ago? I think that Laurie David and her hollywood friends should donate all their money to combat global warming if
it is real, that is instead of talking down to the little people.
Oh! I feel so bad for a little rich prissy bi##h who came to preach to the commoners. Whatever . . . . Hollywood does not make those retard actors/actresses an expert on anything other than where to find a good vein to insert a good shoot-up drug into. If she comes back here . . . I’ll give her a reason to cry.
Chip vs. Laurie
1. both have personal agendas
2. one has a background enabling scientific examination of FACTS
3. Stop the growth in China 1st, then bother me & US
Double dare Laurie, Sheryl, Eddie Bags, et al to take their message to China
Eddie Bags = Ed Bagley, Jr
Max Proctor,
forget S. Crow & check out AMY WINEHOUSE
That’s simply not true. Michaels wrote in his World Climate Report in 1998:
A reasonable offer was made, and the bet was declined.
And ABC News reported in December of 2006:
And then, of course, there’s Michaels 2004 claim that his “bombshell paper” would “knock the stuffing out of Blix’s position and that of the United Nations and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” The IPCC, of course, argues that global warming is man-made and an extremely serious problem. Michaels and two of his allies published a trio of papers in which they argued that global warming doesn’t actually exist and, if it does, it’s so minor as to be irrelevant. Tim Lambert explained why these papers were garbage, with Michaels et al having resorted to cheap parlor tricks like a global temperature map in which they use the same color (dark blue) to indicate “cooling” as “no data available,” giving the appearance of cooling across the world.
Waldo,
Thanks for you comments.
None of the links you included have Dr. Michaels denying than anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are leading to (will continue to lead to) a warming of the average global temperature. They do suggest that things other than anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are also involved, to some degree, in the observed warming and that local and regional changes will be different from global average changes.
As far as a bet goes where we proclaimed “no reasonable offers refused” as I explained on the author of the blog you linked to, we offered the bet in 1998 concerning the period 1998-2007, an offer was made to bet us in 2005–more than 3/4 of the way through the race. That hardly seemed like a “reasonable” offer–when it was clear that we were going to lose. Interestingly, no offer to bet was made to us BEFORE it became obvious that we were going to lose.
As far as Dr. Michaels views on global warming, here is the first paragraph from the first chapter past the Foreward of his latest book on the topic:
Chapter 2. An Introduction to Global Warming
“Global warming is real, and human beings have something to do with it. We don’t have everything to do with it; but we can’t stop it and we couldn’t even slow it down enough to measure our efforts if we tried.”
Denying that there currently exists a quick fix is not the same as denying that global warming doesn’t exist. Too often people (such as yourself) fail to recognize that distiction.
-Chip
[...] From The Hook: The woman who came up with the idea of sweetening sermons about global warming with free Sheryl Crow concerts apparently left the stage of the Pavilion last Thursday and burst into tears. [...]
Pat Michaels gets money off energy utilities. Six-figure money. And that was just last year. Wow, what a coincidence that he’s a global warming skeptic, huh? Hey, Chip: please abandon the pretense of being a disinterested academic. You and Pat are in the pockets of the guys who are slowly choking this planet to death.
Sure, you’re entitled to your opinion. But you and Pat’s opinions about global warming are wildly out of sync with that of the majority of your scientific peers.
So do us a favor: pocket your Enron money and save your commentary for Fox News Channel, not The Hook.
AlGore’sPissedOffBrother. Speaking of money, how many energy credits did you and Al buy last year to give you a license to pollute. A whole buttload . . . we’ll that is just great! Both of you can spend money and be given a license to pollute as much as you want. However, the inner city person who has a single 60 watt bulb to light his/her humble 1 room apartment gets reemed by some Hollywood know it all because he/she isn’t using a 20 watt bulb. Maybe those Hollywood know it alls would like to loan their 6 MPG bus to a couple of those inner city people so they can experience the luxury of having a brightly lit room that money buys.
Hi, Flagman. Uh… What?
PO’d brother. The applicable federal environmental law (Clean Air Act) allows people to buy/trade credits to be able to pollute more than what would be allowed otherwise. Al hasn’t jumped on his own bandwagon. He bought energy credits from others to allow him to pollute more than the average citizen. That is a VERY simplified explanation of a very complex federal law.
Flagman: Gore’s carbon credit “controversy” is a distraction manufactured by those who wish to shift the focus from the issues. Such as: I’m talking about anthropogenic global-warming denier numbskulls. You counter with an ad hominem attack on Gore, who is a leader of a movement that includes the vast majority of respected scientific opinion. You do this because you have no meaningful alternative in this debate.
If you’d like to discuss Gore’s personal self-interested choices, fine. He owns a couple of houses, the gas bill on his travels adds up, and he has not pursued lifestyle choices which could label him an emissions ascetic. If he did go live in a tent and refused to travel except by bicycle, people like you would call him a kook. But he’s not a kook, he’s a principled man who is sounding an alarm backed up by hundreds of mainstream scientists. And he makes personal compromises.
If him paying his own money to buy credits for using more energy in his homes than he otherwise perhaps could puts him in the same league as Michaels, Knappenberger, et al who are taking six-figure payoffs from polluters to parrot a counter-message, hmm, okay. Now that we’ve established that, let’s get back to the issues please.
Whatever. You obviously have no idea what I’m talking about. Go study the applicable environmental statutes and come back in about 6 months when you’re done. And you know what? Al doesn’t need to go live in a tent for people to think he’s a kook. People already think he’s a kook.
By the way, what have you established? NOTHING!