Climate change denier? There’s an app for that

One of our favorite YouTube destinations when our boss thinks we’re working —  besides celebrity nip slips and the infamous exploding whale of course — is Peter Sinclair’s Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

Sinclair, a graphic artist and environmental activist, put both skills together to create a series of authoritative, well-researched and entertaining videos that debunk pretty much every arrow in your average climate change denialist’s quiver.

The Medieval Warm Period. The Broken Hockey Stick. The “Unstoppable” 1,500 Year Warming Cycle. The How Can There Be Global Warming When We Just Had a Blizzard? All of them pretty much get blown up, not unlike the aforementioned whale.

He even takes on the whole “Climategate” stolen e-mail controversy.

Only trouble is, we never seem to be near our computer whenever we’re near a climate change denier. And even if we were, we probably wouldn’t have enough gummi bears in our pocket to get them to sit still long enough to watch it.

Enter technology.

Fast Company’s Dan Nosowitz has a cool post about four new iPhone apps to shut up climate change skeptics and to show them how to fix the damage they’re doing.

The first one, Skeptical Science, has handy drop down menus outlining the major categories of denier arguments, then breaks them into subcategories. It summarizes the argument, provides you with the science that debunks it, and even provides links to the studies the science is based on. Best thing is, it’s free.

The next one Nosowitz describes is the Jungfrau Climate Guide, which gives you data about the Jungfrau region of Switzerland. For instance, if you happen to be standing on a glacier, it can tell you how much that glacier has receded and how fast. We decided to pass on the $9.99 iTunes price, mainly because we have no plans to be in Jungfrau anytime soon and because we couldn’t find a way to hide it on our expense account for our day job.

In any case, we’d love to see the developers create a similar app for our beloved Sonoran Desert, which has warmed considerably in the last 30 years and seen a remarkable change in monsoon patterns. But we digress.

The other two apps,  Greenmeter ($5.99) and GreenYou ($0.99), are calculators of sorts. The first helps you analyze your vehicle and your driving habits so you can be more fuel efficient, and the second helps you calculate your carbon footprint.

Of course we couldn’t find an app that calculates the energy your iPhone uses in downloading all these apps. But give ’em time.

— John D’Anna