Sunday 2 December 2007

How it all ends on YouTube

I just stumbled upon a crazy series of videos on YouTube that have made a crazy amount of buzz:

How It All Ends

This has been viewed over 2.5 MILLION times so far. The author, wonderingmind42, AKA Greg Craven, (story) is a high school physics teacher with a flair for small, controlled tabletop explosions and a vast collection of funny hats. His video sums up the pros and cons of taking action on global warming in a way designed to bypass the idea that we can't act until scientists hand us 100% certainty. And all that in 9.5 minutes!

Well actually he has much more to say on the subject, which he has recorded and linked together with another video index and table of contents, under the revised title "How it all ends" (along with a re-cut of his original video to address some objections.) The expanded version runs to dozens of short clips, each addressing one slice of the pie. It's too bad streaming videos can't include clickable links to other videos - if anyone needed that feature, it's this guy. For now, just view his index to get titles of the additional pieces of his puzzle. [Update: thanks to tbolger for pointing out the clickable menu of these videos on the website manpollo.org.]

In fact, Greg is really plugged in to the state of the art in replying to "climate denial." He gives props to "How to talk to a climate skeptic" (holds up a poster saying to google that phrase ;-) I notice he didn't mention RealClimate in his main video (who knows what's in the hours of additional content - I just saw this today!) But his point is that we need to move beyond just bickering about specific tidbits of evidence and look at the big picture of risk management (a point not lost on the RealClimate scientists).

Here's a blog by another birder who also noticed the viral video by
Born Again Birdwatcher. (I'll say more about my online nickname "birdbrainscan" in a follow-up post.)

5 comments:

Tbolger said...

Actually if you go to Manpollo.org, their main page has all the links in the right order to watch the videos.

Jim Prall said...

Woohoo, my first response on my blog. Of course it had to be one showing I missed something obvious... darn. My plea: time! I put in a couple of hours viewing the YouTube videos and the discussions about them, getting my links right in my post, etc.
Also, I stand by my point that online videos don't yet support embedding clickable links. I'm not sure how one would implement that, it's just a gap that I see.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback and I'll update the post with this info.

Tbolger said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Tbolger said...

Hey no Biggie,

Soon there will be a DVD that a Canadian Grad student is producing using all the videos and all the documents that he tells you to google. I like this idea for a few reasons 1) is sucks to watch well over 6 hours of videos sitting at your computer, and 2) it will be continuous and not the 10 min. start, watch, find next video, repeat song and dance. And 3) it reaches a different audience than streaming video does.

(Sorry for the deleted post I had a misspelling)

Ken Zakreski said...

The DVD is available for sale on rocketdocs.ca .

cheers Ken