There’s an exchange over at Prometheus that nicely illustrates the fundamentally linear face of the public climate debate, as so eloquently characterized by Andrew Revkin’s “pushmi-pullyu” metaphor. The example at hand is the Prins and Rayner paper in Nature last month laying out, in part, the argument for a fuller integration of adapation to climate …
The Kentucky legislature held a hearing the other day about global warming. The featured speakers: James Taylor of the Heartland Institute and the ubiquitous Lord Monckton: Before the hearing, Gooch said he called the Heartland Institute once he decided to address global warming and asked for any skeptical experts it might send. Scientists weren’t necessary, …
I was, by coincidence, in the midst of reading Bjorn Lomborg’s book this week when Andrew Revkin’s New York Times piece on the sloppy center came out. There is much to like about the book, and much to disagree with (more on that later, when I’ve finished it). But the most important thing is that …
Kim Hannula, who teaches earth sciences to undergrads, raises an interesting question: can the “benthic bacteria” global warming hoax paper be used as a teaching tool? If you showed this fake paper to students, what would you ask them to look out for?
A couple of years ago, one of my favorite science teachers was extolling the virtues of those cheap hand held infrared thermometers. He said you just need to hand one to a kid and turn ’em loose and they’ll start asking all kinds of interesting questions and testing out the answers. So I was surprised …
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A bit late notice, entirely because I’m lame (I’ve known about this for a week), but I’ll be on the radio this afternoon at 2 p.m. in Albuquerque: 1350 a.m., NMSR Science Watch, talking about climate variability, the Atlanta drought and its implications for New Mexico.
We’re experimenting with video at the office. Here’s a piece video guy Troy Simpson and I did on research being done out at Sandia Labs.
On the evolutionary origins of war.
For the climate warriors in the audience, a quiz. Who said this? Mankind has a record of reacting after a disaster strikes. Dams are built after floods, not before. So far in human history, disasters have not taken place on a global scale. Therefore we don’t really have a tested mechanism for dealing with global …
I stumbled today on Kim Hannula’s delightful blog, in particular her post about hiking with her four-year-old son: He pointed to something that looked like white hairs on an over-excited yeti. Fibrous ice crystals, holding up pebbles and leaves and bits of frozen dirt. Every shadowed spot was covered with them, when we stopped and …
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