In his first post-election press conference, President Obama received a question on climate change. What he said was likely reassuring, encouraging, and infuriating–all at once–to the climate concerned community. To understand why, read this post by Will Oremus at Slate. He helpfully translates and boils down Obama’s 601 word response to four short sentences: 1)…Continue Reading…
The debate over climate change is well known for excesses on all sides. Those who claim that the issue is a hoax actually have a lot in common with those who see climate change in every weather extreme. The logic behind such tactics is apparently that a sufficiently scared public will support the political program…Continue Reading…
A blogger at Daily Kos rewinds back to the 1988 vice presidential debate and discovers that a question about global warming was posed to Dan Quayle about the the “Greenhouse Effect”: I guess that’s what they called it back then, before Global Warming and Climate Change became popular…There was no, do you think it is…Continue Reading…
One guy is mad as hell and the other guy is Baghdad Bob. Such is the madness of the climate debate.
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…
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…
Two seemingly disparate events this week underscore major shifts in the climate discourse–at least in the U.S. One is the defeat of Senator Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican primary. The other is this NYT op-ed from NASA climate scientist James Hansen. What’s the connection? Well, each, in its own way, illustrate the newly established…Continue Reading…
UPDATE: 5/7: Climatewire reports that Heartland “faces a mutiny” from donors and its Washington staff over the Institute’s billboard campaign, which it abruptly cancelled one day after it was unveiled. The billboards triggered massive outrage and scorn from across the political spectrum. [UPDATE: 5/5: Widespread condemnation of the Heartland billboard campaign (including from Republican politicians and well-known climate science critics) prompted…Continue Reading…
In his weekend op-ed, Thomas Friedman indicated he was ready to embrace a form of climate pragmatism: This is a column about energy and environment and why we must not let the poisonous debate about climate change so tie us in knots that we cannot have any energy policy at all, particularly one focused on…Continue Reading…
I’ve been a bit tortured over this climate endeavor. On the one hand, it involves some really smart people who are bringing the insights of evolutionary biology and social science into the climate change discussion. I’ve found this immensely helpful in my own thinking about the sociopolitical dynamics of the climate debate. But on the…Continue Reading…