Periodically, some readers accuse me of characterizing climate skepticism in an overly broad manner. There are various subspecies, they insist. So I should stop painting all climate skeptics as frothing conspiracy mongers. My rejoinder is that I base my characterization on the loudest, most relentless climate skeptics, who have made themselves the representative voices of…Continue Reading…
During election years, opinion polls and surveys often drive national media coverage of political candidates. This is derisively known as horse race journalism. It is a style that has carried over to everyday political coverage. “I worry that politics is covered almost like sports at a relentless who’s winning and who’s losing kind of way, who’s…Continue Reading…
And so… after a decade in which Americans are listening to you less and less, these warnings have to get more shrill just to have an impact — which, of course, only undercuts the reputation and credibility of those speaking so shrilly. I know who and what you think this is in reference to. Actually,…Continue Reading…
All you people indifferent to climate change, listen up: Global warming is accumulating in the Earth’s climate system at a rate equivalent to about 4 Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations, 2 Hurricane Sandys, or 4 magnitude 6.0 earthquakes per second. This, according to a new widget created by the folks at Skeptical Science. Such a handy little…Continue Reading…
By now, the pattern is pretty well established. If there is a famine, drought, catastrophic flood, wildfire, a major hurricane or typhoon, then you can be sure that trailing behind these disasters, like ambulance chasers, is a brigade of climate-concerned activists, scientists and their enablers in the media. And trailing behind them is an Anthony…Continue Reading…
Yesterday, in a Forbes article repurposed at the Chicago Tribune, a Heartland Institute staffer (who was not identified as such by the Tribune) wrote that, we should thank global warming for making hurricanes less frequent and less severe. Indeed, Hurricane Sandy may well have been much more deadly in the absence of global warming. This led…Continue Reading…
As far as explainers go, I thought this Guardian piece discussing possible links between climate change and extreme weather was pretty good. What’s interesting to me is that it was written by Bob Ward, the policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. It’s part of a larger…Continue Reading…
Sometimes I think the climate debate remains stalled because those who are most concerned refuse to ask the pertinent questions. Instead, they keep refighting old battles that are no longer relevant to a constructive discourse. The latest example is this survey by John Cook et al that is getting a lot of undeserved attention in…Continue Reading…
My eight year-old son is not a disinterested sports fan. He knows as much about European soccer as I do (which is zilch), but when we’re in a barbershop for 15 minutes and Manchester is playing Barcelona, he asks me who we should root for. Ditto for the NBA All-Star game, which I let him…Continue Reading…
When a social cause gains momentum and becomes symbolically important, partisans inevitably hijack it for their own ends. They do this by trying to define and control the meaning of the cause and how it should be perceived. We’re seeing this play out now with the Keystone XL pipeline, which has become a touchstone for environmentalists…Continue Reading…