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…
Never mind that East Africa is reeling from drought and famine, if you’re with Greenpeace and you have an anti-GMO tic, this is what you worry about: Olivia Langhof of Greenpeace Africa, based in Johannesburg, echoes the concerns of other critics in saying that even in the face of a dire need to feed human beings,…Continue Reading…
My latest post at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media is on the bipartisan press bashing habit. Have a look and flog me over there.
Here’s one reason why, drily put by Matthew Yglesias: I keep meaning to write something about the Tar Sands Action protests that had been going on by the White House and then I keep forgetting. That’s pretty much been my excuse, too. The point being, it didn’t live up to the hype. Yglesias goes on to explain…Continue Reading…
In Nature this week, Quirin Schiermeier has written the most lucid, evenhanded article I’ve read yet on the vexing issue of extreme weather/climate change attribution. He also reports on some notable developments. For example, Quirin writes that in the past year, climate researchers in the United States and Britain have formed a loose coalition under…Continue Reading…
Europe’s latest bout of GMO phobia is captured in this Guardian headline: EU bans GM-contaminated honey from general sale In case you didn’t catch the tilt of the article, here’s the subhead: Bavarian beekeepers forced to declare their honey as genetically modified because of contamination from nearby Monsanto crops The thrust of this mind boggling…Continue Reading…