Tom Yulsman ventures back into the political dangerous terrain left by another Al Gore exaggeration on climate change: In an interview with the Guardian yesterday, the Nobel prize winner said business leaders are realizing that action is required on climate change because they are “seeing the writing on every wall they look at. They’re seeing …
Politics and science.
When I was trying to learn the craft of writing about the earth, a geologist who was serving as my guide said I had to read Walter Sullivan’s Continents in Motion. The book was a revelation to me – for the skill with which Sullivan explained the science of plate tectonics, but more importantly for …
I totally forgot last week to link to Troy’s great pink iguana video:
My friend Mark Boslough presented a fascinating analysis last month at AGU comparing the risks of climate change to big rocks from space hitting Earth: One objective way to compare the relative magnitude of the impact threat to that of anthropogenic climate change is to estimate the long-term worldwide fatality rate. For asteroids, the average …
Continue reading ‘Quantifying and Thinking About Climate Risk’ »
(story ad gated, picture courtesy National Geographic, which also had a story)
From a new paper by David Montgomery et al. on the formation of the outflow channels Mars, a rich metaphor from our own desert Southwest. Stare through the classically turgid scientific prose. This is poetry: The Needles area of Canyonlands National Park, Utah, provides a terrestrial analog for the finer-scale extension parallel to the margins …
Continue reading ‘Geology is Poetry if You Listen Carefully’ »
On the horrifying simplicity of the H-bomb, and the possible unmasking of “Perseus”: Reed and Stillman suggest that the Soviets, desperate to solve the riddle of the H-bomb, returned to Perseus for one last favor in 1954. However they got the idea, by late 1955 the Soviets had built and tested their own H-bomb. h/t …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Armageddon Edition’ »
Chris Mooney had a nice piece this week on Science Progress about the decline in science specialist journalists at major mainstream media publications. I think Chris nails the problem squarely, but I’d like to elaborate on the implication, because it applies much more broadly. Here’s Chris’s key point: Science journalism, at its best, should also …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Science Journalism Edition’ »
On being careful to distinguish what you know from what you don’t: Carl Caves (no one calls him “Carlton”) is the smartest person I know. My wife laughs when I say that, pointing out that I often describe someone as “the smartest person I know.” She is right. As the Journal’s science writer, I have …