GLASGOW SCIENCE FESTIVAL
THE HEAT IS ON
Glasgow Science Festival injects a healthy dose of fun alongside wake-up calls about the future of our planet, as Alex Johnston discovers
Nearly 30 years ago, in the summer of 1988, the US experienced record heatwaves. Some 45% of the country endured drought, and the state of Minnesota alone suffered $1.2bn in damage from lost crops. In an effort to understand what was going on, Congress asked scientists if they had an explanation. A NASA scientist named Jim Hansen gave testimony, in which he stated, ‘global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of coni dence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.’
Hansen wasn’t the i rst person to draw the world’s attention to climate change, but he did it in such a way that the world started to take serious notice. Nevertheless, 29 years later, climate change deniers have on their side a US president who proposes to slash funding for environmental programmes, and who is trying to reverse history by promoting coal mining.
It’s against this background that the Glasgow Science Festival’s 2017 programme offers a number of ways to grapple with the future of the planet. Australian documentary The Silent Achiever explores how to manage increasingly frequent high-intensity disasters. For students only, there’s a zine workshop in which you can discover some of the latest work in climate adaptation. There’s also an afternoon of short i lms presenting the problem from the perspective of Native Americans, and a talk by George Loumakis of Glasgow Caledonian University which aims to separate fact from i ction in environmental science.
Later in the festival, two panel discussions offer food for your anxieties. Optimism, Pessimism and the Human Future looks at what makes us feel how we feel about the prospects for the planet, while My Favourite Doomsday features three experts presenting different ideas about how the world will end: you even get to pick your favourite (we’ll have the Destruction of the Earth by the Sun Evolving Into a Red Giant While Humanity, Having Seeded Itself Across the Galaxy Billions of Years Earlier, Peacefully Interacts with Alien Species, thanks. With garlic bread). But the festival isn’t all about wake-up calls and mythbusting. There are also screenings of some i ne i lms such as James Cameron’s The Abyss (his 1989 marital drama in the shape of a sci-i blockbuster), and Joe Dante’s 1987 Innerspace, in which a wisecracking, miniaturised Dennis Quaid accidentally gets injected into the ass of a hypochondriacal grocery store clerk, Martin Short.
Plus, you can explore museum collections in Kelvin Hall, get your wand on with some Harry Potter-themed science activities, and on the i nal day, the Hunterian Museum hosts a range of events including workshops with women engineers from the University of Glasgow.
Glasgow Science Festival, various venues, Thu 8–Sun 18 Jun.
44 THE LIST 1 Jun–31 Aug 2017