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…
A war on drugs whose objective is to eradicate the drug market “” to stop drugs from arriving in the United States and stop Americans from swallowing, smoking, inhaling or injecting them “” is a war that cannot be won. This is a statement that should surprise no one. It comes at the end of…Continue Reading…
Last year, Berkley physicist Richard Muller excited the climate world with this WSJ op-ed: The Case Against Global Warming Skepticism He touted his Berkley team’s preliminary re-analysis of temperature trends that, as Brad Plumer drily noted, appears to have confirmed the basic tenets of climate science. At the time, many climate scientists rolled their eyes at…Continue Reading…
The contradictions in the climate debate make my head hurt. For years, we’ve been hearing that one of the biggest impediments to action is that people aren’t sufficiently alarmed and informed about global warming. And that this owes, in large part, to a collective media failing. Here’s Joe Romm in 2010: The dreadful media coverage simply…Continue Reading…
Last week, I noted that the findings of this Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report were parroted by all mainstream media journalists. Except this one, who actually vetted the report. Well, turns out that Ron Bailey at Reason magazine is the reason why UCS has now issued a clarification about one of its claims. The Guardian (which I…Continue Reading…
Two seemingly disparate events this week underscore major shifts in the climate discourse–at least in the U.S. One is the defeat of Senator Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican primary. The other is this NYT op-ed from NASA climate scientist James Hansen. What’s the connection? Well, each, in its own way, illustrate the newly established…Continue Reading…
UPDATE: 5/7: Climatewire reports that Heartland “faces a mutiny” from donors and its Washington staff over the Institute’s billboard campaign, which it abruptly cancelled one day after it was unveiled. The billboards triggered massive outrage and scorn from across the political spectrum. [UPDATE: 5/5: Widespread condemnation of the Heartland billboard campaign (including from Republican politicians and well-known climate science critics) prompted…Continue Reading…
It’s a testament to James Lovelock’s standing in the science world that one phone conversation can trigger a media tidal wave. In case you’re just tuning in to the news, Lovelock has rejected his own prophecy on global warming, which he previously believed would soon kill off most of humanity and “leave the few survivors living a…Continue Reading…
Every so often something I write shakes up the climate skeptic hive. They also start buzzing like mad, I have noticed, when you explain to them that their honeypot (the climate science cabal) is not really what excites them. Oh well, so much for transparency. In my latest post at the Yale Forum on Climate…Continue Reading…
In his weekend op-ed, Thomas Friedman indicated he was ready to embrace a form of climate pragmatism: This is a column about energy and environment and why we must not let the poisonous debate about climate change so tie us in knots that we cannot have any energy policy at all, particularly one focused on…Continue Reading…