A blogger at Daily Kos rewinds back to the 1988 vice presidential debate and discovers that a question about global warming was posed to Dan Quayle about the the “Greenhouse Effect”: I guess that’s what they called it back then, before Global Warming and Climate Change became popular…There was no, do you think it is…Continue Reading…
When much of the United States was being hammered by drought and brutal heat waves this past summer, there were many media stories that made a climate change connection. The ugly weather and drought-related misery prompted a sarcastic headline from Time: Now Do You Believe in Global Warming? The sense in climate concerned circles was that…Continue Reading…
Two bits of climate news caught my attention today. One comes from Grist’s David Roberts, who says: Yikes: Avoiding dangerous climate change is still possible, but just barely. Whew. Good to hear us humans are still mathematically in the race to avert climate doom. But then I saw this article from ClimateWire, reporting: India is poised to…Continue Reading…
A continuing concern of climate science is the subject of a new paper in Nature: Thawing of Arctic permafrost could release significant amounts of carbon into the atmosphere in this century. When this issue last gurgled up to the media’s attention in late 2011 in sensationalist fashion, science journalism watcher Charlie Petit wrote that Andy Revkin provided…Continue Reading…
One guy is mad as hell and the other guy is Baghdad Bob. Such is the madness of the climate debate.
To frack or not to frack seems like a good question to ask in the context of the climate debate. To ignore it or dismiss it out of hand won’t make it go away. And now that Michael Bloomberg and a leading environmental organization are teaming up to make fracking environmentally friendly, you can bet…Continue Reading…
It has been suggested by some that political action on climate change will require a grassroots uprising similar to the Civil Rights movement. The analogy strikes me as wishful thinking. In 2010, Leigh Ewbank laid out why: Unlike the civil rights movement, climate change has a complex causation. Its effects are indirect, systemic, difficult to…Continue Reading…
In a New York Times op-ed, Charles Fishman writes: We’re in the worst drought in the United States since the 1950s, and we’re wasting it. Though the drought has devastated corn crops and disrupted commerce on the Mississippi River, it also represents an opportunity to tackle long-ignored water problems and to reimagine how we manage,…Continue Reading…
Andrew Montford, a Scottish climate skeptic who blogs at the Bishop Hill site, recently tweeted of his trip to London: Had interesting conversations with a couple of enviro jouros today. Both agreed that media refusal to report “reasonable middle” is problem. This prompted UK climate scientist Richard Betts to respond: It is increasingly annoying that some…Continue Reading…
Nearly a year ago, I wrote that the “new normal” for climate communication and much reportage and analysis implies a connectivity between global warming and weather-related catastrophes. Well, that was then. Courtesy of James Hansen, we’ve entered new terrain in the climate debate. What that looks like at the moment is the subject of a post by me that just went up at Discover.