Interview with Melanie Trecek-King

Craig Shearer - 28 August 2023

This weekend the Yeah… Nah! Podcast crew - that is me, Mark and Bronwyn recorded an interview with Melanie Trecek-King who is one of our international guests at our conference in November. (You can get tickets here!) We’ve released the podcast as a bonus episode.

Melanie is based in Boston, Massachusetts and is an Associate Professor of Biology at Massasoit Community College. She teaches a general-education science course designed to equip students with empowering critical thinking, information literacy, and science literacy skills.

She has a website: thinkingispower.com, which is a treasure trove of information about critical thinking, of particular relevance to skeptics. Her Start Here page is a good starting point.

I particularly like her FLOATER toolkit, which is a great explanation of science and skepticism. FLOATER is an acronym for Falsifiability, Logic, Objectivity, Alternative explanations, Tentative conclusions, Evidence, and Replicability. It really does provide a toolkit for skeptical thinking, and how to evaluate claims.

We’re planning on releasing the interview as a special bonus episode, so please take a listen. It will be exciting to hear her share her wisdom in November.

Cranky Uncle

One of the things that Melanie is promoting on her website is a fun app called Cranky Uncle. This was developed by Dr John Cook, who is based at the University of Melbourne, in Australia. He’s the author of the excellent Skeptical Science website - with the tagline “Getting Skeptical about Global Warming Skepticism”.

The Cranky Uncle app is a fun app (or web page, if you’d like to try it in any browser) that teaches about climate change skepticism, using the idea of a “cranky uncle” - someone, usually of an older generation, who’s been sucked in by climate change misinformation and disinformation propagated in many online and media outlets, and usually funded by the fossil fuel industry.

The app teaches about how to distinguish good sources of information from bad, and about logical fallacies, fake experts and conspiracy theories. Stuff which everybody should be aware of (but unfortunately aren’t).

Wildfires

As we’ve seen recently, events related to climate change really are on the rise. The latest wildfires in Hawaii have had a devastating effect there, and will cost billions of dollars to fix, not to mention the untold number of lives lost (the death toll currently stands at 115 people, but with 388 people listed as still unaccounted for).

A friend pointed me to an article in a recent issue of Science Magazine, which discussed the wildfires in Australia back in 2019 and early 2020. I was in Melbourne at the time, visiting family, and I remember smelling the smoke in the air and seeing the clouds tinged with yellow, even from 100km away. Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall, but there are some shocking statistics in the article. The wildfires themselves released huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere - around 715 Tg - that teragrams (or Megatonnes) - which is an amount equal to 80% of Australia’s annual combined CO2 emissions from all sources - whether annual fire burning or fossil fuel emissions. Wildfires, caused or exacerbated by climate change, themselves are now emitting huge amounts of CO2 leading to more climate change - a disastrous feedback loop.

The article additionally points to an estimated 429 premature deaths and over 3200 hospital admissions related to the fires. It really is shocking and sobering reading.