So, let’s take a short stroll down memory lane, when we saw headlines like this last summer: Climate Experts Agree: Global Warming Caused Russian Heat Wave Now, let’s hop over (it’s not far, either) to this place, where the owner was upset that the NYT wasn’t connecting the Hell and High Water dots to the…Continue Reading…
Bud Ward has a nice dispatch on the AAAS session I wrote about last month, including this revealing back-and-forth I had wanted to follow up on: Another exchange involving an audience member “” in this case Peter Gleick, the head of the Pacific Institute “” also helped illustrate fundamentally different approaches distinguishing the media and…Continue Reading…
Ever wonder how scientists can determine how much carbon dioxide (CO2) is accumulating in the atmosphere? In this engaging story, science writer Tom Yulsman visits a CO2 monitoring station high up in the Colorado mountains and brings a crucial part of climate science down to earth. Here’s the scene and a snippet of how the data…Continue Reading…
Andrew Freedman of the WaPo’s Capital Weather Gang nicely captures my philosophy: I’ve never been a fan of absolutes. People who espouse rigid beliefs – be they about climate change, religion, or politics (or a mix of all three) – instinctively make me question their evidence. As a reporter, I tend to see things in…Continue Reading…
The evolution of Judith Curry, the outspoken Georgia Tech climate scientist, continues. Her emergence in the last few years as a persistent critic of the climate science community can be marked by distinct stages. At first, in the immediate aftermath of Climategate, Curry’s critiques focused on “climate tribalism” and “transparency” issues. By April of 2010,…Continue Reading…
A few weeks ago, I mused that the American Southwest may be on borrowed time. Forget that. The Southwest is toast. A new paper in Nature spells doom. From the abstract: The potential for increased drought frequency and severity linked to anthropogenic climate change in the semi-arid regions of the southwestern United States is a…Continue Reading…
Everything you need to know about this AAAS session, called “Why Climate Communication Continues to be Colossal Botch,” can be summed up by this famous 40 second clip: Yes, I made that title up, too, but really, that’s what it was about. Panelist Gavin Schmidt, echoing the sentiments expressed by Kerry Emmanuel in a session…Continue Reading…
So I’m at the annual AAAS conference and the first session I attended Friday morning was called “Why climate Scientists are from Mars and Science Reporters are from Venus.” I made that up. The thrust of the session mostly focused on the state of science journalism in the rapidly changing digital media landscape. But in…Continue Reading…
Can anyone give me the ten-second elevator speech about this latest climate controversy–the one involving Eric Steig and Ryan O’Donnell? That would be the speech going up. Then on the way down, can anyone give me another primer on why this dust-up matters? I’m serious. When even this guy calls it an “incredibly complicated story”…Continue Reading…
It’s amazing to me that someone can lay out the complexity of the climate problem so well and then follow that with a simplistic, facile call to action. Here’s the set-up by David Roberts at Grist in a post that otherwise compares the differing vantage points of climate scientists and economists: Humanity has never had…Continue Reading…