Question of the Day
At Tumblr, Andy Revkin asks: Would things be clearer if the process known as “global warming“ had been described as “global heating“ from the get-go? His answer: Graph of heat-content anomaly in atmosphere and seas says YES.
Posts Under ‘climate change’ Category
Two Paths for Humanity
Andy Revkin wrestles with Tim Flannery’s new book, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, in a NYT book review: An overwhelming majority of scientists agree that humans have upended hosts of ecosystems and are exerting a growing and potentially calamitous influence on the climate. Some, perhaps in response to public indifference, have…Continue Reading…
The Media as Scapegoat
They’re a little late to the game, but the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media finally gets around to reviewing Matthew Nisbet’s Climate Shift report released in April, which triggered an unhinged response from a handful of popular climate bloggers . (I wrote about that here and here.) The myth of the media…Continue Reading…
Betting on Gore
Nobody has done more to educate the masses about climate change than Al Gore. He’s written a best-selling book and inspired an Oscar-winning documentary. He’s been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for all his efforts. This week Gore rolled out a new campaign to raise awareness of climate change. As Bryan Walsh observes, Gore’s argument””and his point…Continue Reading…
The Climate Debate Froth
In an interesting essay in the NYT, a philosopher reminds us that there is no denying that there is a strong consensus among climate scientists on the existence of A.G.W. “” in their view, human activities are warming the planet. Since there is no denying this, hardcore climate skeptics (who don’t believe in AGW) take a…Continue Reading…
Romm: Global Warming is the Only Correct Answer
Just for kicks, here’s my revisions to the opening paragraph in this Climate Progress post: Another week, another New York Times article Joe Romm post on extreme weather that fails to stretches climate science to simplistically connect the dots to global warming for the public. The NYT Romm blew the Arizona wildfire story. They He blew the Dust…Continue Reading…
A Complex, Combustible Landscape
This nuanced statement by Tom Kenworthy, a former reporter, was spot on until the very end (my emphasis): The reasons that the desert Southwest is having another extreme fire season are complex. They include decades of poor forestry and livestock grazing practices, misguided federal firefighting efforts that have prevented low-intensity fires in Ponderosa pine forests…Continue Reading…
Another Reason for Climate Paralysis
This climate conversation at the Wilson Center covers a lot of interesting ground and is well worth watching. For a taste, here’s one exchange between the host John Milewski and Edward Maibech, director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication. Milewski: One theory I’ve heard, one reason I’ve heard that people respond almost with…Continue Reading…
Wrong Turn for Science Journalism
If you recall, last week I expressed some dismay that a three part series on global warming in Scientific American magazine was financed by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. To my surprise, no journalistic watchdogs (or science journalists) rose up to publicly question this unusual arrangement. But Bud Ward at the Yale Forum on Climate…Continue Reading…
Cautionary Advice for Climate Communicators
Earlier this week, an informal email group I belong to generated a burst of fascinating exchanges after I listed my post on the Yale Cultural Cognition paper. This group consists of journalists, climate scientists, and social science scholars, among others. At the end of the back-and-forth, David Ropeik, a former journalist turned risk expert, posed a…Continue Reading…