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Globe and Mail, Tuesday, discussing a new film about the Inuit experience with global warming:

Most startling for the filmmakers, though, was the Inuits’ belief that along with pollution and environmental changes, caused mainly by Southerners, the Earth has actually changed its tilt. The filmmakers kept hearing this theory in different communities. Perplexed, they contacted the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration for answers, but experts said this was impossible.

When the filmmakers presented some of their findings at the Copenhagen conference on climate change last year, the media picked up on these views of the Inuit subjects, film co-director Ian Mauro says, and alarm bells started to ring in the scientific community. “We had a litany of scientists come back to us, responding after seeing this news, saying, ‘This was great to be speaking to indigenous people about their views, but if you continue to perpetuate this fallacy that the Earth had tilted on its axis, [the Inuit] .... would lose all credibility.’ And so there was really this backlash by the scientific community.”

Dude, that's not a backlash, that's just friendly advice which you really should have taken. By presenting your Inuit elders' opinions on how the earth's axis was shifting due to global warming, you basically allowed everything else they said to be discounted. Even Globe writer Guy Dixon at least tried to come up with a logical explanation (increased haze in the atmosphere is leading to refraction of the sun's rays).

Stuff I've been up to

Haven't been able to write here much... new job is turning out to be wonderfully busy. In other media, a short piece of mine was recently in the University of Toronto magazine, on World War One usage of the university campus by the Royal Flying Corps.