“All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.”
—Carl Sagan

If a picture tells a thousand words, how many does a video cover?

In my efforts to pass on information to people about global warming and climate change, I like using every means possible to get information across. On occasion I’ve passed along some video clips that are useful for my purposes, but just as the internet has a lot of useful information out there, it also has a lot of garbage.

The same applies to videos on the internet. Some are great. And some—not so much. Case in point: I get a lot of response to my blog posts from the skeptic / denier crowd. Much of the time they throw some of the “science” out there that attempts to refute anthropogenic global warming. Generally, it’s pretty easy to argue against the “evidence” they hold dear, but it certainly keeps me on my toes in my efforts to sift through the information they pass along and understand it, especially where it goes wrong.

Recently, one skeptic started an interesting dialogue with me and gave me some information to contemplate. I’d already looked at this information previously and posted a blog about it back in February, but the recent conversation made me explore it in greater detail, leading me to become even more confident that this alternate theory of global warming he was adhering to isn’t correct.

But the interesting thing was that as he continued to argue his case, it got weaker and weaker. He finally tried to summarize his points with a video clip he provided me. I watched the clip and was surprised he even offered it as evidence, because his case was only weakened by it. (I’m not going to show you the clip because I’d rather pass along facts than misinformation, but if you’re interested you just need to follow some of the comments on my recent posts to find it.)

The clip offered as evidence was from the TV program “The 700 Club,” and the news segment covered in the clip was from their “Christian Broadcasting Network.” Although they have been in business since 1966, it’s abundantly clear that the “700 Club” and its host Pat Robertson support a fundamentalist Christian agenda which is very conservative and supports the Republican party openly. Nothing wrong with that, but hardly a forum to provide a balanced news story on global warming and climate change.

So I’m going to make sure I offer video clips that are independent of political parties and are supported by the science. To that end, here’s a great video that’s from NASA. It provides a great summary of some basic facts on global warming. I’d much prefer to hear on the state of our planet and its climate from NASA scientists over religious groups with overt connections to political parties any day.