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…
Christina Larsen at Foreign Policy has a nifty silver lining take on the U.N. climate talks now underway in Cancun, Mexico. It boils down to the “absence of delusions” this time around, or more charitably, no expectations of any breakthrough agreement, much less any significant progress. More interestingly, Larsen considers when, if ever, any similar…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…
David Roberts must not have received the memo that he was supposed to ignore Judith Curry. Seriously, Roberts has made a forceful argument in response to a recent Curry post, in which she wrote: Climate scientists have no particular expertise on politics, economics or social ethics. A scientist’s personal sense of values and morality has…Continue Reading…
This is priceless. The person responsible for researching and writing the SourceWatch page on Judith Curry has an odd way of gathering her information. For example, here are some questions she emailed Curry last night: Hello again Dr. Curry – People who know climate science are having trouble making sense of your critiques, and I…Continue Reading…
Joe Romm has a curious post up today that begins this way: While some confused people think we are headed to a post-partisan era, more reality-based analysts, like centrist political reporter Dana Milbank, know what nonsense that is. Romm’s “post-partisan era” link takes you to a piece he wrote several weeks ago that was critical…Continue Reading…
Last June, I explored the blogospheric polarization of the climate debate in this conversation with two climate bloggers who consciously avoid hyperbole. Naturally, their readership is tiny compared to WUWT and Climate Progress. I got to thinking about this climate divide again after I read a comment by Zeke Hausfather on Judith Curry’s “Heresy” post….Continue Reading…
In a clever thought experiment earlier this week, David Roberts at Grist asked: What should we call people who care about climate change and clean energy? Too bad he asked the wrong question. It should have been: What do we call people who care about climate change or clean energy? More in a minute on…Continue Reading…
In recent posts, I’ve wondered aloud if the stalled policy and political action on climate change presented a window for alternative proposals to gain a fresh hearing. After all, as Tom Yulsman, noting the groundhog day element to the most recent global talks, asks: Who was it who said that insanity is “doing the same…Continue Reading…