I’m not surprised that Romm goes bananas over this front-page article in today’s NYT by Elisabeth Rosenthal, because it prominently quotes Roger Pielke, Jr. Any high profile story with a Pielke makes Romm all frothy. (I do, however, think the piece leaned too heavily on Roger and that it should have mentioned that he is…Continue Reading…
In case you missed the big news about the Lancet retraction, Daniel Drezner has the best meta post. He hints at the parallels between the anti-vaccine nuts, GMO opponents and climate change skeptics (strange bedfellows, aye?). I see it too, but I believe irrationality underlies the anti-vaccine movement while ideology drives the other two. Regardless,…Continue Reading…
Dwight Garner in today’s NYT: I put down Rebecca Skloot’s first book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” more than once. Ten times, probably. Once to poke the fire. Once to silence a pinging BlackBerry. And eight times to chase my wife and assorted visitors around the house, to tell them I was holding one…Continue Reading…
In a recent post and comment elsewhere, I have suggested that better communication will not be enough to convince the masses to embrace climate change as an urgent concern. The philosopher Alain de Botton comes to the same conclusion is this elegant essay: The role of the commentator on the environment is at one level…Continue Reading…
I love it. The blogger who goes on endlessly in blog posts inveighs against tweeting: Journalists simply shouldn’t be twittering on science or other subjects that require more than 140 characters to discuss intelligently, which is pretty much every topic. It makes total sense: it often takes Romm thousands of words to make the same…Continue Reading…
This is not the Donald Duck I grew up with! Oh, lordy, Carl Zimmer peels back the curtain on freaky duck sex. And not just the evolutionary scoop. He’s got slow motion video, too. All set up by this killer lede: There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about…Continue Reading…
In recent years, as newspapers have severely downsized and/or gone under, much of the concern has focused on investigative reporting. But the call to action has been taken up by numerous foundations and individual donors, who have helped launch well-funded and well-staffed new media outlets, such as Pro Publica. There appears to be no such…Continue Reading…
The most immediate one is the vigorous debate Climategate has engendered between individuals of all political, ideological, and scientific stripes. Judith Curry from the Georgia Institute of Technology deserves much of the credit for kickstarting this, first in speaking directly to Steven McIntyre’s audience at Climate Audit, and then shortly after that with another essay…Continue Reading…
Carl Zimmer calls outs Blogging Heads and, to a lesser extent, The Huffington Post, for trafficking in anti-science “quackery.” Zimmer is arguably the best ambassador for science journalism, and I admire the stand he has taken (in ending his participation in Blogging Heads). But the larger implications of his argument leaves me uneasy. He basically…Continue Reading…
Chamberlain had Russell, Magic Johnson had Bird. But Andrew Revkin of The New York Times, like Shaquille O’Neal in his prime, has no peer. Nobody comes close to matching the breadth and depth of climate change coverage that Revkin consistently demonstrates. This was amply evident on Friday, when the Global Humanitarian Forum, an organization headed…Continue Reading…