If you recall, last week I expressed some dismay that a three part series on global warming in Scientific American magazine was financed by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. To my surprise, no journalistic watchdogs (or science journalists) rose up to publicly question this unusual arrangement. But Bud Ward at the Yale Forum on Climate…Continue Reading…
Earlier this week, an informal email group I belong to generated a burst of fascinating exchanges after I listed my post on the Yale Cultural Cognition paper. This group consists of journalists, climate scientists, and social science scholars, among others. At the end of the back-and-forth, David Ropeik, a former journalist turned risk expert, posed a…Continue Reading…
If there is anyone out there who still believes that a lack of knowledge of climate science (e.g., the deficit model) prevents people from grasping the consequences of global warming, raise your hand. Now read this passage from the abstract of a recent study: The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public…Continue Reading…
While reading the intro to the new SciAm blog network (launched today), this caught my eye: We are trying to eliminate the artificial line between “blogging” and “journalism” and focus on good, accurate writing, no matter what form it comes in or what software is used to produce it. Our bloggers are a part of…Continue Reading…
An intellectually bankrupt, marginalized social movement with an expired shelf life is at a crossroads. (Metaphor mix alert!) On Saturday, a Guardian article asked: Has the green movement lost its way? True, we have heard this tune before. This time, however, there is mounting evidence that more charter members of the club are at last recognizing that…Continue Reading…
Is Mark Lynas, the author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, downgrading global warming in his hiearchy of environmental concerns? In a recent post, he writes that biodiversity may well qualify as a more important planetary boundary even than climate change itself. By way of reminder, the “planetary boundary” concept was laid…Continue Reading…
Here’s a delightfully salty essay from a fellow Brooklynite (of course!) which you should chew on while pondering the collapse of civilization. Pay special heed to this: There is a good reason that the environmental movement in this country — and those tiny, blonde Northern countries — do not win the hearts and minds of most…Continue Reading…
The issue of special interest/advocacy funding is ever present in the climate change debate. Several months ago, Matthew Nisbet challenged the conventional wisdom that environmental organizations were being vastly outspent by industry-affiliated associations and deep-pocketed conglomerates with an anti-regulatory bent. One of the things that perpetuates the monolithic climate skeptics-are-funded-by-industry meme is the lack of…Continue Reading…
Mainstream libertarians really don’t know how to deal with crazy-ass, anti-government fanatics. The libertarian fall back position is a combination of reflexive sympathy for anyone who distrusts government and a minimization of the threat posed by the curdling of the more zealous, violence-prone militia types. This is evident over at Reason, where one of the…Continue Reading…
Five years ago this September I was fortunate to spend a week with a team of archaeologists who were surveying remote stretches of Utah’s Desolation Canyon. Half the crew set off on the Green River and the other half on horseback, working their way down the Tavaputs Plateau. (I’ll get back to those horse guys in…Continue Reading…