Dear readers, you have spoken. And what I’m hearing based on the silence greeting my (admittedly vaguely sketched out) idea for a Bipartisan Climate Project is this. Now I’m willing to eat my humble pie, but I’m also prompted to place this stinker of a comment generator in some larger perspective. This also gives me…Continue Reading…
The overwhelming consensus is that President Obama hit all the right notes in his Tucson speech earlier this week. I know I was moved and inspired by it. On the one hand the President said, “let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy — it did not,” but…Continue Reading…
A reader of James Fallows has a suggestion to better focus the national discussion of the moment that is equally relevant to the climate change debate: I would love to see a list of common sense rules (similar to Michael Pollan’s food rules) that serve as good reminders of civil discourse. What would you like…Continue Reading…
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute advance their argument for a “third pathway” in the energy/climate debate. The two dominant sides, they assert, have constructed increasingly baroque fantasies of the other. To partisan greens, skeptics are fossil fuel-funded and brainwashed planet killers too stingy to spend a postage stamp a day to…Continue Reading…
They don’t have much sway in the party of Limbaugh, but there is such a thing as gay Republicans, and a species known as Republicans for Environmental Protection. Cognitive dissonance aside, they’ve even been around for a while. But did you know there was also a rare breed of conservative climate scientists? There’s even a…Continue Reading…
People have been teeing off on this
Over at Real Climate, Ray Pierrehumbert has a meaty post that takes up this assertion by Ramanathan and Victor in their recent NYT op-ed: Reducing soot and the other short-lived pollutants would not stop global warming, but it would buy time, perhaps a few decades, for the world to put in place more costly efforts…Continue Reading…
Much of the discussion on the “low-hanging fruit” post revolved around a hypothetical question: would tackling secondary climate forcings (such as soot and methane) pave the way for stronger climate policies down the road, or further defray action on carbon dioxide, which happens to be the more pressing long-term threat? At this juncture, political and…Continue Reading…
There doesn’t appear to be much mainstream news coverage of yesterday’s big climate confab on the Hill, so it’s a good thing we have blogs to pick up the slack. If you want a descriptive overview, check out Jeff Tollefson at Nature. For a selective play by play, including color commentary by Gavin Schmidt, go…Continue Reading…
The symmetry of Gavin Schmidt and Judith Curry posting similar themed essays on the same day is too good to pass up. I found both posts fascinating and suggest that people read the pieces back to back. Then read them again. Let’s start with the tags each chose for their posts, which, to me, signifies…Continue Reading…