The new movie “Cool It” is out today and just wait till people get wind of this thumbs up review in the NYT, especially this passage: Debunking claims made by “An Inconvenient Truth” and presenting alternative strategies, “Cool It” finally blossoms into an engrossing, brain-tickling picture as many of Al Gore’s meticulously graphed assertions are…Continue Reading…
James Fallows has a cover story on the inevitability of coal in The Atlantic magazine that is a must-read. The piece cogently lays out why coal is king and why it must be made to be clean. The story is already prompting knee-jerk annoyance in predictable places. More on that in a minute. Here’s the…Continue Reading…
This piece of advice from Rex at Savage Minds pretty much holds true for all of life: There is just nothing like meeting someone in person to assess, in flash, whether or not they are actually The Shit. But he’s speaking specifically about how to navigate the whirlwind of conferences. And he’s spot on, which…Continue Reading…
This announcement, that Judith Curry will be giving Congressional testimony next week, is sure to send the climate blogosphere into overdrive. At her site, Judith writes: I have been invited to present testimony for this hearing. I have been specifically asked by the minority (Republicans) to discuss how we can go about responding to the…Continue Reading…
The population issue has bubbled to the surface this year, with Fred Pearce calling concerns of population growth a “green myth” and Philip Longman, more recently in Foreign Policy magazine, warning about a planet of graybeards. It’s nearly impossible to discuss population without mentioning Paul Ehrlich’s role in the debate, and usually he comes out…Continue Reading…
Despite the lull in action, the climate wars show no sign of abating. Personally, I like Bart’s “way of harmony,” but if this is truly a street fight, then more likely we’ll end up with the political and rhetorical equivalent of scenes like this.
In the past year various panel reports on “climategate” and the IPCC have called for greater “transparency” in climate science. But what about transparency in journalism? Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor and influential media blogger, has been calling for it for years and does so again in the wake of the Keith Olbermann suspension: …self-respecting…Continue Reading…
One of my favorite new blogs (for me) is Ecological Sociology. Its current post on Stewart Brand’s hypocrisy hits all the right notes. (Monbiot is all over this.) Long story short: In Brand’s book, Whole Earth Discipline, he evidently writes (I haven’t seen the passage myself yet): …In an excess of zeal that [Rachel] Carson…Continue Reading…
Some recent scholarly research on the relevance of storytelling to the climate change debate gets aired out in a USA Today column by Dan Vergano, of which this is the thrust: “Scientists, academics, and politicians on the left, do not do stories very well,” says Harvard political scientist Michael Jones, who earlier this year led…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…