A panel at this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting was summarized afterwards in a AAAS press release: Cable news junkies, take heart: if you love wall-to-wall coverage of hurricanes, wildfires and superstorms, your future viewing schedules will be jam-packed. Researchers at the AAAS Annual Meeting said that wild weather events…Continue Reading…
It appears that certain media moguls and self-important, publicity-addicted narcissists are in good company when it comes to confusing climate and weather. Yesterday, I was alerted to this press release, which starts off: A University of British Columbia study of American attitudes toward climate change finds that local weather – temperature, in particular – is…Continue Reading…
In his big speech earlier this week, President Obama put the American people on notice that he intends to make climate change a centerpiece of his second term. But is the nation with him on that? The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reports: Dealing with global…Continue Reading…
If I call you anti-science, which discourse might that be related to? The one on climate change, evolution, biotechnology, or vaccines? Because the term is flung around so freely, who can tell. That was the point I tried making with this recent post. More importantly, is slagging you as anti-science a constructive way to have a conversation? In fact, it’s likely…Continue Reading…
A year ago, I noted that “much reportage and analysis on climate change” was beginning to emphasize the connection between global warming and weather related catastrophes. This emphasis gave rise to a new meme, which Newsweek summarized in the sub-headline of a cover story: In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. To understand just how…Continue Reading…
When much of the United States was being hammered by drought and brutal heat waves this past summer, there were many media stories that made a climate change connection. The ugly weather and drought-related misery prompted a sarcastic headline from Time: Now Do You Believe in Global Warming? The sense in climate concerned circles was that…Continue Reading…
My previous post on Nature’s use of “denier” in a recently published paper has triggered a lively comment thread, including this question to me: Since you obviously object to the usefulness of the term “˜denier’, would you care to comment on its appropriateness after considering Micha Tomkiewicz“˜s thoughts? This is in reference to several provocative blog posts by a Holocaust…Continue Reading…
Several years ago, while wrestling with the climate skeptic/denier terminology, I queried a number of my colleagues on which term they used as shorthand. None of them used the “denier” term, but most were also uncomfortable with “skeptic” as a one-size-fits all label. My own thinking on this was captured by Time’s Bryan Walsh, who…Continue Reading…
Every so often something I write shakes up the climate skeptic hive. They also start buzzing like mad, I have noticed, when you explain to them that their honeypot (the climate science cabal) is not really what excites them. Oh well, so much for transparency. In my latest post at the Yale Forum on Climate…Continue Reading…
I’ve been a bit tortured over this climate endeavor. On the one hand, it involves some really smart people who are bringing the insights of evolutionary biology and social science into the climate change discussion. I’ve found this immensely helpful in my own thinking about the sociopolitical dynamics of the climate debate. But on the…Continue Reading…