Climate and the Web: ‘Electronic Democracy on Steroids’

This is a clip of an interesting article. I suggest you follow the link and read it. Good perspective.

clipped from dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com We tried an experiment a week ago in collectively deconstructing President Bush’s latest speech on climate change. One early post here tried to create a “starting point for productive climate discourse.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the same kind of experiment, but with a lot of the consensus-building happening behind closed doors. That leaves it subject to criticism from those saying it’s overly conservative or prone to warming alarmism. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Center for Collective Intelligence is creating what it calls a wiki-style Climate Collaboratorium aimed at clarifying issues and options related to human-driven climate change. The idea began in a 2006 paper by M.I.T.’s Mark Klein and others (pdf alert). A video summary is on YouTube: Gavin Schmidt at Realclimate.org and NASA also recently weighed in on blogging and climate science