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…
Earlier this week, Juliet Eilperin at the WaPo discussed the results of a new study that the Climate Doom messaging crowd might want to pay attention to: In the experiment involving undergraduates, the subjects read a news article that began with factual data provided by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, but had…Continue Reading…
Kudos to Simon Donner for picking up on one of the more interesting things that Jon Stewart said last week in his interview with Rachel Maddow: This is–I’m not saying–look, I love the voices that I hear on MSNBC. And there’s a difference between–here’s what’s unfair about what I do. This is really what’s a…Continue Reading…
Great column today by Thomas Friedman, recounting a whopper of a story that went viral until CNN’s Anderson Cooper debunked it. This is how you properly debunk a story, or a claim (as opposed to a person). Not by declaring again and again that someone is the most debunked person in the universe.
It’s much more complicated than the old one, argues Mike Hulme in the Guardian, and that, he says, is a good thing, one year after the event that triggered “climategate.” Here’s what I think is the money quote from Hulme’s thought-provoking op-ed: The 12 months since 17 November 2009 have shown brutally that the social,…Continue Reading…
This week should bring us a flood of one-year anniversary stories on the stolen email scandal known as “climategate.” Looks like Nature is first out of the box with its profile of Phil Jones, who agreed earlier this month to talk at length about his experience. He proved largely unrepentant. Anthony Watts is annoyed that…Continue Reading…
Have you ever known someone too proud or pigheaded to admit he was wrong? Let’s say it was a particular claim this person made, that turned out to be false, but which the person couldn’t admit to getting wrong. Would this then lead you to think that the person’s stubbornness in this one instance masks…Continue Reading…
Yesterday, Justin Gillis published an excellent front page NYT article on climate change and sea level rise. Of course, the tone wasn’t catastrophic enough for this guy, but he’s never happy unless the story pummels the reader into “hell and high water” submission. Today, Gillis blogs on an interesting side note to his main piece:…Continue Reading…
There’s a decency to Jon Stewart that seems to be in his fiber and which has manifested itself as a kind of professional ethic. This was driven home to me in a fascinating interview he did last night with Rachel Maddow, when, at one point, he said: There’s no honor in what I do, but…Continue Reading…
It’s pretty one-sided, with George Monbiot continuing to land all the punches. But in going for the knockout, Monbiot swings and misses hugely. Here’s why. At the end of his latest takedown of Stewart Brand, Monbiot selectively lists some of Brand’s corporate clients, setting up what Monbiot thinks are the following two death blows: When…Continue Reading…