There seems little point in commenting here about the Al Gore-Mr. Justice Burton kerfuffle, given that a) everyone who comes here and cares about climate issues already knows all about it, and b) everyone who comes here and cares about climate issues has already made up their mind about its significance. But since I’ll lose …
More evidence that David’s back: Quark Soup’s monthly global temperature report. Tim Ball still wrong.
People looking for information on the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine should go here.
Via Michael Tobis, I see that Quark Soup, the first sciency blog I ever read and always one of my favorites, is back.
Andrew Dessler has a great post today on the implications of the recent ozone chemistry discovery for the standard argument that science as an institution is uncomfortable with those who attack consensus: Overall, the idea that any scientific community is not interested in new ideas is ridiculous. Good new ideas are the fuel that science …
reading: Tired of printing out PDF’s, I’m placing my order today for the IPCC Working Group I report paper of the day: “A Method of Approximating Rainfall over Long Periods and Some Results of its Application,” A.E. Douglass, Science, Jan. 3, 1913. Sorry, nothing to link here, you’ll just have to take my word for …
There’s an interesting framing thing going on here in New Mexico around the Fiscal Year 2008 budget. The House of Representatives is pushing some relatively deep cuts in the nuclear weapons research, development, manufacturing etc. budget. For those not familiar with New Mexico, we’re home to two large nuclear weapons labs. Those cuts would effect …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Framing Edition’ »
One of my great frustrations as a science journalist covering environmental controversies is that they are often driven not by risks themselves, but by the entities that cause them. Thus, for example, an environmental risk caused by us – the hazardous wastes we through out in our own trash, which ends up at a municipal …
But the question “Has man inadvertently changed the global climate, or is he about to do so?” is quite legitimate. It has been widely discussed publicly – unfortunately with more zeal than insight. Like so many technical questions fought out in the forum of popular magazines and the daily press, the debate has been characterized …
Matthew Nisbet nails the New York Times’ hanging curve ball in his analysis of the problems of the collision between science and journalism, quoting Andrew Revkin’s fabulous line about “the tyranny of the news peg.” The context is a piece by the always provocative Gary Taubes about the problems of epidemiological research. I’ve given a …