cmooney
Posts by this author
May 16, 2007
A wonderful documentary -- and one that has a lot to say about the critical importance of science communication -- has finally made the big time.
Ignore everything the Discovery Institute is saying about it, by the way--the formerly terrifying think tank of yore has now been reduced to complaining…
May 16, 2007
The North Indian cyclone that I blogged on yesterday, later named Akash, now has its own extensive Wikipedia entry. Akash never had much time to gather strength before making landfall in Bangladesh/Burma; it only drove about a 5 foot storm surge. Nevertheless, 3 fisherman were killed and 50 are…
May 15, 2007
The latest stop of the Mooney-Nisbet show (or Nisbet-Mooney show) wasn't a stop at all--it was right here at home in Washington, D.C., at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. We were glad to see some familiar faces in the audience, including ScienceBlogs' own Jason…
May 14, 2007
Uh oh. This one could be trouble.
The deadliest tropical cyclones on earth are those that have struck low-lying Bangladesh. Twice in the past fifty years, storms in this region have killed more than 100,000 people. By far the worst was the 1970 Bhola cyclone that killed 300,000 to 500,000.
I'm not…
May 13, 2007
I'm going to try something new here at "The Intersection," hoping I don't regret it.
I'm going to be traveling to Italy for a friend's wedding roughly May 21 through May 28. And I've sworn that, for once, I'm not bringing my computer along.
So for that week, rather than having the blog go dormant,…
May 12, 2007
Over at Speaking Science 2.0, we've just put up pictures from the first joint Mooney-Nisbet talk, at the Stowers Institute in Kansas City. Click on over there and check it out.
Our next talk, open to the public: Monday May 14th, 5 pm, Washington D.C. at the annual meeting of the American Institute…
May 9, 2007
Subtropical Storm Andrea, image courtesy of the Naval Research Laboratory, off the Georgia-Carolina coast.
Hurricane season is here in the Atlantic, and it's almost a full month early!!!!
This is just out from the National Hurricane Center:
SPECIAL TROPICAL DISTURBANCE STATEMENT
NWS TPC/NATIONAL…
May 7, 2007
On April 6, 2007, as many of you already know, my good friend Matthew Nisbet and I published a policy forum article in the journal Science. A week later, we followed up with a somewhat longer commentary in the Sunday edition of The Washington Post. In both articles, we argued that scientists,…
May 4, 2007
Last week, it was suggested, ridiculously, that the Nisbet-Mooney "framing science" team might actually be a sleeper cell of crypto-creationists.
Roger Pielke, Jr., who similarly has to deal with repeated charges that he's a conservative or a Republican, has now come to our defense:
Chris, and…
May 4, 2007
The 16 storm 2003 Atlantic hurricane season (click to enlarge) -- a possible analogue for 2007?
As we get closer to hurricane season--and especially once the season starts--the forecasts become increasingly reliable. We're still a month away, though, so what follows should be taken, as always,…
May 3, 2007
In my opinion, my brother's very best and most innovative song is a tune called "Wrinkles," which is always a show stopper. Now, there's a video of him performing it live. Click here for the YouTube version or watch the performance as the latest channel on Davy Mooney TV:
May 3, 2007
Via Guns, Germs, & Steeled, I just noticed that Steven Hawyard of the American Enterprise Instiute and Pacific Research Institute has released a rather tacky parody movie of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I just watched it; you can do so here.
In general, Hayward is trying to position himself as…
May 2, 2007
From Houston to New Orleans to Miami to Pass Christian, Mississippi... I'll be covering a lot of ground this summer to talk about the new book. I can now officially anounce the first dozen or so of what will hopefully be many more public presentations across the country--mostly in hurricane…
April 30, 2007
Well, it's April 30, which means that for most of the Southern Hemisphere, hurricane season just ended. It hasn't been a particularly busy year for any of the Southern Hemisphere cyclone regions except the Southwest Indian Ocean, which took one hell of a beating (see above; image courtesy of Meteo…
April 27, 2007
Nisbet has reproduced it but I'll do so here as well. Note that the letter comes from a biologist and a theology professor at the University of Portland:
Science 27 April 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5824, pp. 540 - 542
DOI: 10.1126/science.316.5824.540c
Letters
Science, Religion, and Climate Change
A…
April 26, 2007
From his blog:
Camp 3, which is perhaps not as well defined, promotes the inclusion of theistic elements in evolutionary biology, in some cases explicitly in other cases as a kind of "fill in the blank," in order to provide a better approach to "framing" evolutionary biology. (Notice the closeness…
April 26, 2007
I spent about 24 straight hours traveling yesterday, crossing the Pacific and such--so I've been a bit out of it. But what do I come back to?
Fellow Sciencebloggers John Wilkins and Tim Lambert have both done posts--with lotsa cool pics--about our recent adventures, intellectual as well as…
April 24, 2007
My new book, Storm World, will not be out for another two months yet; it hits in early July. However, the early reviews are coming in from outlets serving the literary and publishing industry such as Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. And I'm now tremendously pleased to be able to report that…
April 22, 2007
I've had a wonderful time in Australia; as will be shown in my forthcoming Seed column, the experience has also been very eye opening in a lot of ways. It's winding down, though: I do one last talk here in Sydney, and then it's off back to the states on that ridiculously long plane ride.
Tim…
April 20, 2007
Yesterday I gave a talk in Melbourne at the Bureau of Meteorology, sponsored by the Melbourne Centre of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. Although in my previous conference talk here I had already raised the subject of framing (see coverage here and here), this time (for the…
April 15, 2007
Once again, I can't keep up with all the latest reactions to Nisbet-Mooney. There are just too many of them (over 160 comments at PZ's blog alone; and even my own blog is pushing 40 right now). I'm in Australia prepping a series of talks, and that's the top priority at the moment.
However I'd like…
April 14, 2007
I looked out my window this morning in Melbourne--after sleeping off jet lag--and saw seven hot air balloons in the sky. You would never see something like that over a U.S. city.
It was a pretty good introduction to the awesome country that I have the fortune of visiting for the next 10 days.
I'…
April 14, 2007
It has begun--especially with this post from PZ. He is ticked at us for our Washington Post piece. Oddly, PZ goes through much of the article but not the specific response to him:
There will always be a small audience of science enthusiasts who have a deep interest in the "mechanisms and evidence…
April 14, 2007
Following the Science piece, there has been a great need for Nisbet and I to expand upon our arguments regarding "framing." Matt did so the other day on NPR, and now we have a joint piece in the latest Washington Post outlook section that goes further.
In the Post, we focus on one of the most…
April 13, 2007
Matt Nisbet has just done a segment with NPR's "On the Media" about our "Framing Science" article in Science. At Matt's blog, he notes that this is just the first of many instances in which we'll be starting to elaborate on the arguments advanced in our (necessarily brief) Science piece.
In any…
April 12, 2007
There have been a lot of oddities when it comes to the reception of our Science piece.
One is how many people can't even correctly spell Nisbet's name.
Another is the seemingly dismissive attitude towards much communication research. Perhaps the best comment on this phenomenon came from Chad Orzel…
April 11, 2007
I am pleased to say that Science has made our much-discussed article available by author referral. So for those who haven't read it yet, now you can.
Here's the trick: You've gotta go to Matt Nisbet's blog to do so. Then click the link on the left margin.
Meanwhile, of course there have been tons…
April 11, 2007
I didn't know there was a reporter in the audience. But the Salt Lake Tribune has a full length write-up of the talk I gave at the University of Utah law school on Monday. It nicely quotes the central punch-line of my (new) presentation, which obviously differs in tone from the talks I gave before…
April 10, 2007
I've had some great travel experiences over the past week--taking in the National Hurricane Conference; sleeping in my mom's FEMA trailer; getting to try out a new talk (with "framing" content) in Camarillo, CA, and Salt Lake City, UT; getting to see Sandhill Cranes and strutting Sage Grouse in…
April 9, 2007
I gotta confess--I can't keep up any more with all the reactions on the "framing science" front. The latest is from Gavin Schmidt, who has a really thoughtful item on how this plays out in real time for a scientist who has to go before the media.
Perhaps my all time fav post so far is from Orac,…