Christopher Hitchens is being lionized today for many things. I met him once, in the early 1980s, after signing him up to to speak at my college. The first thing he said to me, after arriving: “Comrade, where do you go to get a drink around here?” He was terrific that day, of course. Andrew…Continue Reading…
There is a popular belief in some quarters that the media is timid with its coverage on climate change. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. The dominant narrative for some time has been that global warming is real and will soon wreak havoc with the planet and civilization. Some in the climate concerned community…Continue Reading…
It is just about as obvious that AGW [anthropogenic global warming] is not a serious problem as it was that the Nazis weren’t in 1936. Plenty of supposedly reasonable people had plenty of reasonable reasons to do nothing about it then, but today we just think they were stupid. Wasn’t it just obvious, weren’t the…Continue Reading…
Miller-McCune has an article titled, “Why Isn’t Climate Change on More lips?” It starts off: Eighty-three percent of Americans believe the Earth is heating up, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsons poll. Yet most live as though global warming isn’t taking place, even while knowing that it is. The piece goes on to discuss an array of denial devices…Continue Reading…
I just read a post that leads off this way: In January 2009, new voluntary pharmaceutical industry guidelines on marketing to physicians went into effect (David 2010), which emphasize disclosure and transparency regarding the relationship between physicians and pharmaceutical companies. They also require changes in how pharmaceutical companies market products to physicians. In fairness, the…Continue Reading…
There’s something remarkable happening this week in the climatesphere. People who routinely thunder that we are on the verge of climate doom have mostly shrugged at the lackluster outcome of the recent climate summit in South Africa. I’m wondering if they’ve self-medicated themselves with sedatives. Consider that, last week Grist’s David Roberts wrote (his emphasis): If…Continue Reading…
So you’ve probably heard there was some sort of climate agreement reached this past weekend. The spin afterwards was impressive and misleading. (The media’s collective interpretation was mostly perplexing.) Here’s my modest attempt at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media at untangling what went down and what it means for the bigger picture.
On Friday, when most environmentally-inclined people were despairing about the the torturous climate talks in South Africa (since ended, good roundup and assessment here), a short op-ed appeared in the NYT, arguing that despair over the fate of the planet was getting a bit stale. The three authors of the piece–a journalist and two scientists–don’t…Continue Reading…
There are two recent critiques of science journalism that paint very different pictures of the profession. One of them, an editorial in Nature this week, is more broadly aimed at the news media in general, and decries “scientific ignorance of the press,” agenda-driven stories, and “journalism that favors attitude over accuracy.” The criticism is directed at…Continue Reading…
Roger Cohn, the editor of Yale Environment 360, conducted an interesting interview with Mary Evelyn Tucker, a scholar who studies the intersection of ecology and religion. This is a perennial interest of mine, even though I’m a life-long atheist. Most people in the world (including many scientists) possess a religious faith or seek out some kind…Continue Reading…