Sometimes I think the climate debate remains stalled because those who are most concerned refuse to ask the pertinent questions. Instead, they keep refighting old battles that are no longer relevant to a constructive discourse. The latest example is this survey by John Cook et al that is getting a lot of undeserved attention in…Continue Reading…
Does it matter if a social movement hitches its wagon to the wrong horse? For the food movement and its embrace of the GMO labeling cause, I argued yes in Slate, because it is predicated on junk science and blind, simplistic mistrust of multinational corporations…The pro-labeling camp wants people to believe that eating “frankenfood” is dangerous…Continue Reading…
It appears that certain media moguls and self-important, publicity-addicted narcissists are in good company when it comes to confusing climate and weather. Yesterday, I was alerted to this press release, which starts off: A University of British Columbia study of American attitudes toward climate change finds that local weather – temperature, in particular – is…Continue Reading…
I’m such a piker that I always think it’s neat when 10 or 20 people retweet me. Occasionally, when the planets are aligned, several dozen will retweet a piece of mine or something interesting I may have said in 160 characters. I mean, it’s not like I’m Donald Trump, who has over 2 million followers….Continue Reading…
In his big speech earlier this week, President Obama put the American people on notice that he intends to make climate change a centerpiece of his second term. But is the nation with him on that? The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reports: Dealing with global…Continue Reading…
If I call you anti-science, which discourse might that be related to? The one on climate change, evolution, biotechnology, or vaccines? Because the term is flung around so freely, who can tell. That was the point I tried making with this recent post. More importantly, is slagging you as anti-science a constructive way to have a conversation? In fact, it’s likely…Continue Reading…
The British environmental writer Mark Lynas gave a speech recently that opened with this remarkable mea culpa: I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in…Continue Reading…
A continuing concern of climate science is the subject of a new paper in Nature: Thawing of Arctic permafrost could release significant amounts of carbon into the atmosphere in this century. When this issue last gurgled up to the media’s attention in late 2011 in sensationalist fashion, science journalism watcher Charlie Petit wrote that Andy Revkin provided…Continue Reading…
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.
It’s hard to overstate the legacy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was published in June of 1962. Carson’s monumental book drew widespread attention to the overuse of pesticides and their lethal effects on wildlife and the environment. But Silent Spring accomplished much more than that. As Robert Gottlieb observed in his own seminal history on environmentalism, Carson…Continue Reading…