In 2003, Bill McKibben published an essay in the literary magazine Granta ($$ Req), titled, “Worried? Us?” What he rued then still holds true today: People think about “˜global warming’ in the way they think about “˜violence on television’ or “˜growing trade deficits’, as a marginal concern to them, if a concern at all. Hardly…Continue Reading…
Now that this day is here, I can imagine the current EPA Administrator gleefully thinking, in the deepest recesses of her subconscious, “You wanna piece of this…” Somewhere, Christie Todd Whitman is having a bad flashback.
Building on recent concerns, the U.S. Navy is mulling climate change a lot lately. (H/T, The New Security Beat.) Memo to Romm and other catastrophe-mongers: instead of conflating every major flood or wildfire with global warming, which is not credibly supported by science, why not talk more about the increasing apprehension within the U.S. military…Continue Reading…
The thing you have to respect about Thomas Friedman is that he does halftime adjustments as well as Bill Belichick. So climate activists would be wise to pay special attention to today’s column, because Friedman lays out the best game plan I’ve seen yet on how they can get their team back in the game….Continue Reading…
Andrew Sullivan is convinced that global warming is real, but he also belongs to the reality-based community, so he poses this dilemma: Should we bear the heavy economic and social costs of trying to mitigate it in the teeth of a global depression? Or should we find creative ways to adjust to and live with…Continue Reading…
“What will a post-crash, truly 21st-century world look like? For people “¨thinking about global systems (economic, environmental, and social) “¨one idea stands out: resilience.”¨” So begins a must read piece in Fast Company by futurist Jamais Cascio. The concept of resilience, as defined by Cascio, means the capacity of an entity–such as a person, an “¨institution, or a…Continue Reading…
I’ve been chewing over this column by Nicholas Kristof since yesterday. Of course, he’s not the first to observe the central paradox of our revolutionary new medium: it gives us infinitely more and varied perspectives, yet it also abets increasingly polarized debate. Kristof, in ruing the latter, gets the big picture right. But in making…Continue Reading…
Is your stance on global warming shaped by influential pundits or politicians who share your worldview? In light of the recent George Will/Al Gore/Andrew Revkin blogosphere controversy, kudos to John Fleck for revisiting this important 2007 Yale study. Still, I’m not sure what to make of the study’s essential finding– that your position on say,…Continue Reading…
This absurd post by Joseph Romm, in which he accuses The New York Times of “media malpractice” due to supposed errant climate change coverage in several recent stories, reveals a doctrinaire mindset on the relationship between global warming and natural disasters that is becoming all too common in environmentalists. Romm is ticked off because, among…Continue Reading…
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the horrible fires in Australia can be partly attributed to global warming. It’s a legitimate storyline, which many in the media have picked up on. By and large, these stories have been measured, with the appropriate caveats. (See here and here for two good examples.) The brutal…Continue Reading…