In her recent Mother Jones story, Julia Whitty mentions that “destruction of nature” has become a “dominant meme” in environmental discourse and politics. Her excellent piece does not follow this familiar script. Rather it chronicles the extraordinary conservation successes of a few unsung individuals. Anyone who follows environmental writing knows that Whitty’s article bucks a…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…
UPDATE: Watts has toned down his momentous hype. He apparently has a healthy sense of self-importance that leads him to make grand pronouncements. That sound you hear is air deflating from the climate skeptic sphere. Either Anthony Watts is in possession of big-time climate news or he’s over-dramatizing a piece of news that he thinks is big:…Continue Reading…
If you had time to read only one scholarly paper on drought, I’d suggest this one (published in 2007) by Cook et al. It’s a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary overview that amply supports this assertion made in the first sentence of the abstract: Severe drought is the greatest recurring natural disaster to strike North America. The Cook…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…
Environmentalism, as a social movement, has atrophied. At the national level in the United States, it’s become reflexively oppositional, a marginal political force, and subject (with good reason) to caricature. This is because it remains wedded to an outdated paradigm, as I’ve previously discussed here. Despite its long history of anti-pollution advocacy, which has helped lead…Continue Reading…
It’s not in the headlines or on the evening news, but there’s a big story that some people are discussing. And it’s going to get bigger and matter way more than the heat waves and extreme weather that everyone in climate circles is buzzing about this summer. To catch up on this story, you should…Continue Reading…
How inconvenient. I go away on vacation for a few weeks and during that time everybody, it seems, becomes convinced that global warming has struck the earth like the Ten Plagues of Egypt. So does this mean the message (unabated carbon emissions = climate damnation) finally–finally!–has been received by 1) the media, 2) all earthlings…Continue Reading…