It’s always a curious thing when liberals become conservatives (or vice versa), and people do an about-face on climate change or atheism. You wonder what triggered the conversion. Was it a gradual shift, an existential crisis, or an epiphany? On individual issues, I wonder if it depends on how deeply you are invested in a given position….Continue Reading…
A continuing concern of climate science is the subject of a new paper in Nature: Thawing of Arctic permafrost could release significant amounts of carbon into the atmosphere in this century. When this issue last gurgled up to the media’s attention in late 2011 in sensationalist fashion, science journalism watcher Charlie Petit wrote that Andy Revkin provided…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…
It has been suggested by some that political action on climate change will require a grassroots uprising similar to the Civil Rights movement. The analogy strikes me as wishful thinking. In 2010, Leigh Ewbank laid out why: Unlike the civil rights movement, climate change has a complex causation. Its effects are indirect, systemic, difficult to…Continue Reading…
In her book Doubt: A History, the scholar and poet Jennifer Hecht writes about having awe for the universe without being religious. She talked about this during a radio interview: It seems that if you have a doctrine, a version of rationalism or a version of atheism that makes it so that you have to be worried about using the…Continue Reading…
In a New York Times op-ed, Charles Fishman writes: We’re in the worst drought in the United States since the 1950s, and we’re wasting it. Though the drought has devastated corn crops and disrupted commerce on the Mississippi River, it also represents an opportunity to tackle long-ignored water problems and to reimagine how we manage,…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…
The cantankerous Jerry Coyne, in a recent post, takes issue with popular “science-lite” books that offer superficial analyses of and solutions to social problems or””most disturbing to me””superficial descriptions of scientific work. This is a recurring bugaboo for scientists. It springs from a deeply rooted attitude that science journalist Deborah Blum aptly described here. So which authors have…Continue Reading…
I left the house early this morning in a stupor, so I could beat the crowds at Fairway. Of course, I forgot the canvas bags. My wife, instead of castigating me, showed me this. It’s the Brooklyn equivalent of Portlandia. Not all of this is true to our lives (we don’t pick up stuff left on the curb…Continue Reading…