This is not rocket science. The Earth is warming; there’s an important human contribution, and it’s something to worry about. This is the scientific consensus. Earth scientists are substantially split only on whether the warming is potentially catastrophic. A nice distillation by John Nielsen-Gammon on where we stand.
I have a new post up at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media that suggests Vice President Gore and like-minded allies are fighting their battle from a “defensive crouch,” which won’t get them where they want to go. Nor am I the only one wondering if Gore’s recent 24-hour mediathon is the…Continue Reading…
Bt cotton now helps to avoid several million cases of pesticide poisoning in India every year, which also entails sizeable health cost savings. This is not the sort of news you’re liable to hear about in anti-GMO quarters, where the concerns of the small farmer are righteously defended.
Gail Collins writes today in her NYT op-ed that Michelle Bachmann scored a Tea Party version of a home run when she laced into Rick Perry for trying to require girls in Texas public schools to be vaccinated against HPV, a sexually transmitted disease that can cause cervical cancer. A bit further down in her…Continue Reading…
The climate debate, with all its rivalries, melodramatic clashes, and endless reprisals, often resembles a modern-day
Last month, when Jon Huntsman criticized his fellow Republican Presidential candidates for spreading malarky about evolution and climate change, conservatives, by and large, looked away. So it is a curious thing that many commentators on the Right are now jumping all over Michelle Bachmann for her “dangerous flirtation” with the anti-vaccine crowd. Orac has a…Continue Reading…
I think that Americans, around their dinner tables, in barber shops, in bars and around the proverbial water cooler, have had the sort of conversation that takes place in part one of this fascinating roundtable dialogue in Sunday’s New York Times magazine. (It is the same issue that contains Bill Keller’s reflective essay that I…Continue Reading…
Over at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, I ask how reporters and bloggers can most responsibly handle the climate/weather connections while the evidence is still being gathered and interpreted. Check it out and offer your suggestions over there.
In yesterday’s NYT magazine, Bill Keller papers over a dark chapter for journalism and the NYT: the WMD craze, which was the Bush Administration’s pretext for the Iraq war: The remedy for bad journalism is more and better journalism. Reporters at The Times made amends for the credulous prewar stories with investigations of the bad intelligence…Continue Reading…
I can’t remember the last time I stood in a room full of people concerned about climate change that was so full of optimism. That would be the launch party of a new foundation devoted to promoting the advancement of thorium. Why would we want that? The idea is to create a new generation of…Continue Reading…