Author Archive

Anthony Watts' Phony, Selective Outrage

Anthony Watts, the proprietor of the well known climate skeptic blog, WUWT, seems to have a double standard on what constitutes an insult to ethnic groups. Watts is making a big deal out of some recent comments by Timothy Wirth, a former U.S. senator and now the president of the UN Foundation, who reportedly said this…Continue Reading…

Repositioning the Climate Debate

A very interesting essay by Andrew Hoffman begins this way: The American debate over climate change turns on two main themes. One is the science of the problem; the other is government measures to fix it. Many believe these themes cover the entire debate. They’re wrong. Far more than science is at play on climate change. At…Continue Reading…

Utah Archaeologists Get Whacked

I have a story that just went up on the Science magazine website. I’ll have much more to say about it on my site over the weekend. UPDATE: I didn’t see this editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune until after my story was published in Science. Here’s an excerpt: Puzzling out the real reason why…Continue Reading…

Taking on Climate Capos

In my critique of the PBS segment on Al Gore’s Rolling Stone essay, I took what, in hindsight, looks to be a cheap shot at AEI’s Ken Green, when I wrote that he was aping Marc Morano’s tactics. Though Green has been an occasional commenter on this site before, I’m not actually familiar with where…Continue Reading…

The Confusion Over Climate Reporting

One reader, in response to my post on the PBS discussion of Al Gore’s Rolling Stone essay, asks me if I have any comment on Gore’s primary critique; namely that the MSM is failing the public on this issue? I thought media bashing and climate change was your bete noire”¦. I do have some thoughts, but…Continue Reading…

PBS Gets Gored in Climate Debate

Oh, the irony. Yesterday, Rolling Stone magazine posted Al Gore’s 7,000 word essay, which is critical of the media’s (and President Obama’s) handling of climate change. That same day, the highly respected PBS news show hosted a discussion of Gore’s essay. Instead of inviting non-partisan environmental scholars or political scientists to analyze the essay’s premises,…Continue Reading…

A Climate Olive Branch

Leo Hickman in the Guardian takes stock of some recent encouraging developments and muses: Could peace talks ever end the ‘climate war’? In his article, he wonders, are there any shared goals between the two warring parties in the climate debate worth finding “peace” for? Towards the end, he sums up: When so much of…Continue Reading…

Shark Tales

As a kid growing up in the 1970s, I saw my share of movies that scarred my tender psyche. For example, I learned at an early age to avoid garbage trucks with front loaders. That little boy who made very bad things happen scared the bejesus out of me. And then there was Steven Spielberg’s first…Continue Reading…

Doomsday Fatigue

A lament from Time magazine’s Bryan Walsh: Work in environmental journalism for very long and you can eventually become inured to catastrophe. Every ecosystem is on the brink of collapse; every endangered species is just a few steps from extinction; every government decision to authorize an oil well or a coal mine is the one…Continue Reading…

The Climate Knowledge Gap

Richard Harris of NPR has a story that explores why Americans are so ignorant about climate change. Here’s how it begins: The American public is less likely to believe in global warming than it was just five years ago. Yet, paradoxically, scientists are more confident than ever that climate change is real and caused largely by…Continue Reading…