Joe Everett is the Family History, Local History, and Microforms Librarian at the Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library. He has over 25 years combined experience in the genealogical field at BYU, the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, and Ancestry.com.

Joe manages the collections and patron services of the BYU Family History Library and serves as a faculty liaison to instructors in BYU's Family History undergraduate degree program and others involved in family history on campus from social to computer science.

At FamilySearch, Joe was a library program manager providing services for the more 5,000 family history centers. Previously at FamilySearch, he headed the International Reference floor at the Family History Library, and also worked for several years as a technical services librarian, cataloging Slavic and Germanic records. He has served on numerous strategic planning and program development teams at FamilySearch. At Ancestry.com, he worked in content acquisitions and content product and project management, putting genealogical databases online.

Joe earned a B.A. in Russian Language and in Family History/Genealogy (Germanic emphasis) from Brigham Young University and a Master of Library Science from Emporia State University (Kansas). He has been a member and officer in various library and genealogical associations and has lectured and published articles on U.S. and European family history research, historical geography, and migration.

10 September 2009

California wildfires not caused by global warming, says meteorologist

Watch this and judge for yourself. I think it is healthy to look at alternative perspectives. Most folks these days act as if global warming were an irefutable fact. I think the jury is still out. I am not "anti-global warming", if one can be such--either global warming is happening or it isn't, regardless of whether you "believe" in it or not. It may or may not be a true phenomenon and time will tell. What I am against is the politicization of science and the silencing of alternative scientific explanations, on both sides. It is simply not good science when debate is closed, facts are distorted or ignored, and alternative theories are villified. Whether the meteoroligist in this video is right in his conclusions about the data he sees, I at least like his approach of looking at facts. You may quibble about the facts he uses, but if you do, I want to see some data to back it up, not unsubstantiated attacks like, "Yeah, well, he could have made up those maps and charts himself." Maybe he did. If you think so, then provide some evidence to back up the assertion. Don't just assume it. Having said all that; at the end to the day, whether or not the earth is on an overall warming trend attributal to humans, I do think it makes good sense to conserve energy and resources, and to have clean air and water, etc. Its too bad people need to be motivated by fear of calamity before they will act as responsible stewards of the earth.

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