An inspiring Nobel Peace Prize Forum
March 13th, 2009,
My wife and I attended the 21st Annual Nobel Peace Prize Forum at St. Olaf College last Friday and Saturday, March 13 and 14. In an arrangement with the Norwegian body that grants the prize, the forums are held at a group of Minnesota and Iowa colleges founded by Norwegian settlers. Since the 2007 Peace Prize was given to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the topic was, of course, climate change. Fortunately for me, the location for this year was St. Olaf.
It was a wonderful and inpsiring conference, and I wanted to share with you the two sessions that stood out the most for me:
The first was the opening keynote address by Dr. Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University. He gave an excellent and entertaining lecture about the scientific understanding of climate change. He also explained the process that the IPCC uses in making its reports, and in the question-and-answer session he made some informative comments about climate change skeptics, among other things (the questioner had asked about George Will and his views on climate change). I recommend watching the video of his talk. It’s worth the investment of time. (Alley starts at around 32 minutes into the video.)
The other particularly inspiring session was a presentation by college and high school students about their work on climate change. This gave me great hope for the future. The youth are taking action: forming groups, lobbying politicians, organizing their fellow youth, getting people to do energy audits, and more. Many of the students had just attended PowerShift, the big climate change student conference in Washington, D.C. the week before. Timoth Den Herder-Thomas of Macalester College was especially impressive in his comments, and he told about the upcoming Summer of Solutions event, in which youth will work on grassroots project related to climate change and also potentially lay the groundwork for careers in this burgeoning field. There is so much to do, and we need their leadership. Now the older folks just need to get out of the way.
March 16th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
[...] Bill Ostrem, Northern Letter [...]
May 26th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Good afternoon
Positive Christianity
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Most White people just want to live their lives in a decent, wholesome= environment free of Black crime, free of homosexuals corrupting their= children, and free of hordes of Mexican immigrants, invading their towns.= White men fought a Revolutionary War to establish the Right to “Keep= and Bear Arms”, and Jesus told his disciples to arm themselves with= swords. Positive Christianity recognizes that the way that most White want= to live their lives is consistent with the Bible. Judeo-Christianity,= however, is the perversion of Christianity by liberal Jews, which demands= that we tolerate filth, Black crime, homosexuals, and allow the Jews to= tell us how to live our lives. Positive Christianity is based on the Word= of God, not the word of liberal Jews.
If Jews are God’s Chosen, who claim the Torah (laws of Moses), why do they hate the Ten Commandments and oppose their public display?
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