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.
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…
If climate hawks (see, I can play along) weren’t so stubborn, they’d listen to people like Paul Kelly: The world knows all about the stated dangers to climate. It has heard the projections and in large part accepted the science. Every government, every school from kindergarten through university, most newspapers and magazines and media outlets…Continue Reading…
What does slavery have to do with climate change? Here’s how Andrew Hoffman, an engineer who teaches sustainable development at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, makes the connection in an email exchange with John Broder at the NYT: Just as few people saw a moral problem with slavery in the 18th century, few people…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…
To fully understand the enduring Judith Curry Phenomenon, you have to appreciate the power of a storyline that is not much discussed: Curry as climate apostate. I realized this last year, after seeing some of the incredulous response to my first Q &A with Curry, which is why I immediately followed up in a second…Continue Reading…
There’s a big profile of Judith Curry by Michael Lemonick in the November issue of Scientific American that, thankfully, is not behind a paywall. The piece is very well done–it’s actually more a dispassionate examination of what Lemonick calls “the two competing story lines” of the “Judith Curry phenomenon,” which are, on the surface at…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…
Drought, like global warming, is a slow motion event that humans can’t get seem to get ahead of. Or properly grasp. For a good historical case study examining how the Maya, the Vikings, and the U.S. (in the lead-up to the Dust Bowl) each responded to drought, see this paper by Ben Orlove, who observes:…Continue Reading…
The collapse of U.S. cap and trade legislation and the irrelevance of global climate talks means there’s a narrative vacuum that needs to be filled. That would be the Where Do We Go From Here narrative. Make no mistake: there will be a bloggy blood bath over who gets to shape this narrative. And it…Continue Reading…