Earlier in the year, Roger Pielke Jr. was named as a contributing writer for Nate Silver’s newly re-launched FiveThirtyEight site. Shortly after that, Pielke, a climate policy scholar and political scientist at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, published an article at FiveThirtyEight headlined, “Disasters Cost More Than Ever–But Not Because of Climate Change.” Critics pounced immediately in…Continue Reading…
In 2013, Jeff Goodell wrote a long piece in Rolling Stone explaining how rising seas would eventually drown the city of Miami, Florida. The money quote: “Miami, as we know it today, is doomed,” says Harold Wanless, the chairman of the department of geological sciences at the University of Miami. “It’s not a question of if….Continue Reading…
It wasn’t that long ago that global warming was mostly discussed as (and believed to be) a distant threat– the scope, timing and severity of its impacts considered uncertain. Then in recent years, as climate scientists began studying and asserting linkages between greenhouses gases and severe weather events, the discourse shifted. We are now at…Continue Reading…
This is notable: The dangers of nuclear power are real, but the accidents that have occurred, even Chernobyl, do not compare to the damage to the earth being inflicted by the burning of fossil fuels — coal, gas and oil. That’s from an editorial in today’s New York Times, which will make for uncomfortable reading…Continue Reading…
George Monbiot, Britain’s most popular environmental writer, has arrested himself. Four prominent climate scientists recently issued a pleading letter to greens to stop opposing nuclear power. And now an influential non-profit that for years has focused on climate change is all but begging that we not close down aging nuclear reactors. What the hell is going on? I…Continue Reading…
In the latest report issued last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there is a chapter on human security that caught the media’s attention. I thought Seth Borenstein’s AP piece did a nice job distilling the chapter’s essence: Top scientists are saying that climate change will complicate and worsen existing global security problems,…Continue Reading…
When I take issue with the one way skepticism and hyperbolic language of climate skeptics, I’m met with a chorus of “who me?” They especially object to being lumped together with the climate-science-is-a-hoax crowd. It’s a fair complaint. At the same time, it’s worth noting that the representative standard bearers for climate skeptics are Anthony…Continue Reading…
Twenty years ago, a hugely influential article by Robert Kaplan titled “The Coming Anarchy,” was published in The Atlantic magazine. Kaplan argued that the environment would be the “national security issue of the early twenty-first century.” He predicted that resource scarcity and ecological degradation would be destabilizing forces in the developing world, “making more and more…Continue Reading…
In the late 2000s, the notion of “clean coal” was widely panned. As Bryan Walsh wrote in a 2009 Time piece: currently there’s no economical way to capture and sequester carbon emissions from coal, and many experts doubt there ever will be. Critics in the Guardian and elsewhere dismissed “clean coal” as industry greenwash. But…Continue Reading…
In the late 2000s, a new climate change story line emerged in the media. The seeds for this narrative were perhaps sown ten years ago, when a worst-case scenario report commissioned by the Pentagon triggered breathless headlines about a research field known as “abrupt climate change.” Perhaps you saw the 2004 movie. The sensationalist portrayal of…Continue Reading…