Climate Madness
One guy is mad as hell and the other guy is Baghdad Bob. Such is the madness of the climate debate.
Monthly Archives : August 2012
What to Make of the Shale Revolution?
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…
What Actual Climate Progress Looks Like
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…
Why Science Can't Replace Religion
In her book Doubt: A History, the scholar and poet Jennifer Hecht writes about having awe for the universe without being religious. She talked about this during a radio interview: It seems that if you have a doctrine, a version of rationalism or a version of atheism that makes it so that you have to be worried about using the…Continue Reading…
When Opinion Leaders Don't Lead
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…
What to Do About the "Polluted" Climate Discourse?
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…
How to Convey the Complexities of Science?
The cantankerous Jerry Coyne, in a recent post, takes issue with popular “science-lite” books that offer superficial analyses of and solutions to social problems or””most disturbing to me””superficial descriptions of scientific work. This is a recurring bugaboo for scientists. It springs from a deeply rooted attitude that science journalist Deborah Blum aptly described here. So which authors have…Continue Reading…
My Ridiculous Life
I left the house early this morning in a stupor, so I could beat the crowds at Fairway. Of course, I forgot the canvas bags. My wife, instead of castigating me, showed me this. It’s the Brooklyn equivalent of Portlandia. Not all of this is true to our lives (we don’t pick up stuff left on the curb…Continue Reading…
Talk GMOs to Me
HuffPo’s minky in-house science blogger talks GMOs with a plant geneticist. (Hey, you don’t title your show/column”Talk nerdy to me” if you look like Ann Ramsey in Throw Momma from the Train.) The scientist who was interviewed says the science blogger knows her stuff. I agree. I watched it about 12 times. Then I moved on…Continue Reading…
Rumble in the Climate Jungle
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.