For decades, environmentalists and many earth scientists have been warning that humans are exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity, that our numbers (7 billion and counting) and the way we farm, fish, and live is overwhelming the ecosystems we depend on. In 2009, Johan Rockström and two dozen colleagues proposed a new approach to global sustainability in…Continue Reading…
Last week, we received this scary bulletin out of Berkley, California: A prestigious group of scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation…Continue Reading…
On twitter, British science journalist Martin Robbins recently said: Mixing fact and opinion in journalism is inevitable. Anyone who thinks they write pure, unbiased fact is quite deluded. This is true. Newspaper and (especially) magazine stories often have a specific angle or slant. So there is no such thing as pure objectivity. Journalists, like everyone else,…Continue Reading…
When reports are issued by environmental advocacy groups, they are invariably taken at face value by environmental journalists. Oftentimes the report’s methodology and claims aren’t subject to any critical examination. What usually results are one-sided stories that treat the advocacy group’s report as gospel. A glaring example I’ve pointed to in the past is this…Continue Reading…
As I mentioned yesterday, I participated in a panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on environmentalism. The event centered on Roger Scruton’s new book, “How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism.” (My fellow panelists included Daniel Sarewitz of Arizona State University and Kenneth Greene, an AEI resident scholar,…Continue Reading…
Last month, in several exchanges that pivoted off this post, Scott Denning, a climate scientist at Colorado State University, observed: There is an inexcusable silence from the political right about how to provide energy for 10 times as many people as we do today (almost all in China and India), without quadrupling CO2 for thousands…Continue Reading…
My, how times have changed. Thirty years ago, what was the likelihood of Americans electing a black president and accepting gay marriage? We really have progressed, haven’t we? Or maybe not. In 1982 (the year synthetic insulin was created via genetic engineering, by the way), 44% of Americans believed that God created humans in their…Continue Reading…
In Europe, anti-GMO activism has turned increasingly confrontational, which seems to have backfired in one recent case. In the United States, anti-GMO sentiment has taken a different form, which Amy Harmon of the New York Times wrote about last week in this excellent piece: For more than a decade, almost all processed foods in the United…Continue Reading…
So what are the broader cultural, political and economic ripples of the German nuclear phase-out? On the one hand, it will send a signal to the world that nuclear is dated and dangerous and that switching it off is a greater priority than limiting carbon emissions as swiftly as possible. It will also damage the…Continue Reading…
It goes like this: 1. You fear something. 2. You find a hypothesis to justify your fear. 3. You block stuff that doesn’t support your case. That’s from Tim Minchin, who concisely describes the process that leads anti-GMO opponents and apparently many greens to support destruction of an agricultural experiment, that as John Timmer notes,…Continue Reading…