Posts Under ‘select’ Category

The Dirty Art of Character Assassination

In a 2010 editorial, the journal Nature told embattled climate scientists to wise up and “acknowledge that they are in street fight” with their nastiest detractors. At the time, this seemed like a reasonable admonition, since climate scientists were indeed under siege following an illicit disclosure of emails that put the climate science community in an unfavorable light….Continue Reading…

Spotty Media Coverage for a Busy Climate News Week

In a world where everything from revolutions to extreme weather events is attributed (in some way) to global warming, it is helpful when a body of diverse experts come together to review and discuss what we currently know about the impacts of climate change. So the report issued yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences is…Continue Reading…

The Persistence of a Popular Environmental Meme

There are certain tropes that linger in the public imagination long after they’ve been discredited. Such is the case with the “balance of nature.”  In 2009, the ecologist John Kricher wrote a book about this “enduring myth,” and years before that, another ecologist, Daniel Botkin, published his seminal Discordant Harmonies in 1990, which I think was…Continue Reading…

The Climate Bomb

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…

China's Green Future Is As Hazy As Its Skies

When China makes international news these days, it’s often because of its densely polluted air. The public health aspect of this story is usually front and center, while the global warming angle is somewhat muted. Still, there’s no getting around the climate implications of China’s reliance on coal. There are signs that China is trying to…Continue Reading…

The New Normal: Climate Ambulance Chasing

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…

Why One Zombie GMO Myth Can't Be Killed

An opinion piece in Al Jazeera repeats many of the tropes one frequently hears about GMOs. The accompanying photo (also displayed in this post) is an apt illustration. At the center is a person holding a sign that connects Monsanto and Agenda 21, which is an innocuous U.N. sustainability initiative that has been turned into a feverish…Continue Reading…

Climate Extremists Shrink the Space for Reasoned Debate

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…

What Is Bjørn Lomborg Trying to Achieve?

In the latest issue of Cosmos magazine, I have a piece on Bjørn Lomborg, who, as I write, shot to fame in 2001 with his first book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, a broad critique of the environmental movement that infuriated many ecologists and greens. The notoriety transformed the little-known Danish statistician into a globe-trotting public intellectual. Since then,…Continue Reading…

When News is Hazardous to Your Health

Earlier this week, ABC News asked: Can wind power be hazardous to your health? Some residents of a Cape Cod town have complained about headaches, nausea and other symptoms that they attribute to noise from wind turbines near their homes. I’ve written about “wind turbine syndrome” a bunch of times, including here at Discover and…Continue Reading…