Quacks in the Internet Age

The Internet has made it too easy to be a quack. In my desk drawer at work, I have a wonderful collection of old UFO nuttiness from the early 1990s. It’s wonderful stuff – wildly imaginative zines full of poor writing, even poorer graphical presentation and absolutely wonderfully muddy thinking. Back in the day, you …

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climate->drought->fire

A record year for wildfires in the U.S.: Drought and hot conditions contributed to the record wildfire season, with more than 9.5 million acres burned through early December, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The annual climate report, released Thursday by the National Climatic Data Center, says 2006 will most likely be the third …

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Those Batshit Crazy Livermore Guys

The boy dropped off his pass-along copy of the Nov. 16 Rolling Stone, that I might enjoy Jeff Goodell’s powerful strange and fascinating piece about Lowell Wood and geoengineering. Wood’s idea – not really “Wood’s idea,” really “lots of people’s idea” – is to pump shit into the atmosphere to cool things off, a geoengineering …

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A New Mexican Insurgency

My colleague Tania Soussan wrote Saturday about what Andrew Dessler has described as “the climate change insurgency“: Cars with dramatically better gas mileage. More energy-efficient houses and offices. Doubling the renewable energy flowing through New Mexico’s grid. Those are among the 69 recommendations announced Friday by a special climate advisory group created by Gov. Bill …

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