cmooney
Posts by this author
March 21, 2007
I'll be doing the Morning Show on New York City's WOR Morning Show, at 7:10 am, with hosts Joe Bartlett and Donna Hanover. The subject: Global warming and Al Gore's testimony. You can listen live by going to the WOR page and clicking...."Listen Live." I won't be on for all that long, so if you're…
March 21, 2007
I found Al Gore's opening testimony--which I just watched--deeply stirring. Whenever I hear the guy talk, my feeling is always the same: He exudes intelligence.
By contrast, I found the behavior of Rep. Joe Barton--constantly raising petty parliamentary objections, quibbling over whether Gore's…
March 21, 2007
The former veep hits both houses of Congress today--David Roberts has a very useful rundown of the hurdles he will face, including cross-ex from good old Inhofe. I am not particularly worried that on an intellectual level, Gore will have a serious problem with questions from any individual member.…
March 20, 2007
...in the "General Excellence" category for publications with a circulation between 100,000 and 250,000. Details here. The issues nominated are June/July, November, December/January.
I've posted the covers below, along with my pieces from each issue. Congrats to all the hardworking and visionary…
March 20, 2007
I had the fortune last night of seeing a really cool IMAX docu, Hurricane on the Bayou, at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. The film is not only visually spectacular; it's a powerful musing on the loss of coastal wetlands, and how that has, in turn, increased the vulnerability of the…
March 20, 2007
Finally my first reflection on yesterday's revealing hearing is up--at HuffingtonPost.com. I've been hoping to write there more frequently, and some of the material that came out yesterday was so juicy that I devoted an entire entry to it. I have merely pulled one of many threads from the latest…
March 19, 2007
I just got back from Capitol Hill. The hearing is ongoing, and you can watch it here. I had to leave if I was going to get anything written today. The upshot: There were a lot of new revelations and developments, and there is really a ton to say. I'm on the case, but it may take a while to process…
March 19, 2007
The big action today in science and politics is clearly going to be on Capitol Hill, where Henry Waxman is holding his second "scientific integrity" oversight hearing. According to Rick Piltz, C-SPAN will be broadcasting the hearing live for those who are interested.
As for me, I'm heading to the…
March 18, 2007
I just received a long blog comment from Rich, who manages the Black Rock Tourist Park in South Hedland, Australia. They bore the brunt of Cyclone George down there, and Rich's comment makes for fascinating--and harrowing--reading. Here's one tidbit:
The ceilings literally rose and fell inches as…
March 16, 2007
NASA now has an image up of what was our strongest storm so far this year--Cyclone Indlala, which was a mid-range Category 4 at its peak with 125 knot winds (144 mph). Pressure is estimated, by the University of Wisconsin folks, to have dropped down to 919 millibars.
As for damage, we don't know…
March 16, 2007
At least according to a report I just read from E&ENews (unfortunately subscription only), Henry Waxman's politics and science oversight hearing on Monday is going to feature:
* NASA's James Hansen
* Philip Cooney, formerly of the American Petroleum Institute, currently of Exxon Mobil,…
March 15, 2007
My recent post on the New York Times attack on Gore has gotten around a lot (see Slate, for example). Robert Wright (of Nonzero fame) also brought it up on BloggingHeads.tv in a dialogue with Mickey Kaus. I encourage you to watch the whole segment, as I think it really has the right take on this…
March 15, 2007
I just got the press release from the Union of Concerned Scientists: Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a whistleblower bill (H.R. 985; PDF) that lays out explicit protections for scientists in government who expose abuses. The UCS release (for which I do not have a link) notes some…
March 15, 2007
Antalaha, the namesake of this post, is a town on the northeastern coast of Madagascar.
In 2000, according to CNN, Cyclone Hudah struck Antalaha and leveled "nearly every building." It appears that Hudah was a Category 4 storm at landfall. The United Nations added that the town was "…
March 14, 2007
Cyclone Indlala has intensified at "greater than climatological rate"--i.e., damn fast--and is now a Category 4 storm on its way to slam the northeastern coast of Madagascar (after further intensifying along the way).
I have been looking at the data on this storm from the Cooperative Institute…
March 14, 2007
I've just added some new stops on the Chris Mooney "book tour" page. Not that I'm really on "book tour" at the moment, but, er, I certainly am pretty addicted to travel. And so in the next few months I'll be hitting some new spots where I've never given talks before:
Saturday, April 7, 7:00 PM-8:…
March 14, 2007
Last night the JTWC said this one was a Category 2 but I suspect it's much stronger than that now. The latest satellite based estimates from Cooperative Institute for Meteorlogical Satellite Studies say closer to Category 4. Madagascar could have a bad landfall ahead...
March 13, 2007
Via Matt Nisbet, I see that Gallup has asked a pretty careful polling question to determine what the public thinks about the hurricane-climate relationship. As I detail in Storm World, some past polls on this question were so poorly worded that few conclusions could be drawn from them.
Now Gallup…
March 13, 2007
...and frankly, I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner.
Let me be clear: I have seen An Inconvenient Truth, and I found it almost entirely accurate. Gore has done a tremendous job of drawing attention to this issue and he gets the science right by and large. But my question as a point of strategy…
March 13, 2007
As I noted previously on this blog, while in Vancouver I did a radio show on global warming in which one of many "skeptic" callers used the example of noted MIT oceanographer Carl Wunsch, and an alleged quotation from him, to cast doubt on the latest science. Having come across Wunsch's name…
March 12, 2007
I am jesting with the title of this post, but only in part. You see, never before in my memory have I seen hurricane intensity models in such radical agreement on a storm as I now see for the storm named Indlada in the South Indian (via Kerry Emanuel's website):
Indeed, there seems to be more…
March 12, 2007
Seed has just put online my piece from the last issue--a profile of NASA's James Hansen. A lot has been said about Hansen in the past--he is inarguably our best known climate scientist--so I leave it to you to figure out whether I've actually said anything new. Here's a hint, though: I think I…
March 12, 2007
According to the Secular Coalition of America, Pete Stark (D-Ca) doesn't believe in God. I am quite certain he's not the only such individual in Congress, but the fact that even in this day and age, such a revelation is tantamount to coming "out of the closet" is really staggering....
March 12, 2007
Over at Wikipedia, the storm that caused the damage pictured at left is currently classified as a Category 3 hurricane (albeit one with a very low minimum sea level pressure of 910 millibars). The maximum intensity estimate from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center also corresponds to Category 3. But…
March 10, 2007
The new issue of the mag is out, with a very provocative cover, as you can plainly see. I've got a piece in there with five recommendations for Democrats as they set out to restore scientific integrity to our government.
On Thursday, at a panel discussion held at the American Association for the…
March 9, 2007
Last year, we watched as four rapidly intensifying typhoons in a row hit the Philippines in the space of a few months. Something was just up with the ocean-atmosphere system in that particular area, and it was a deadly combination.
With the Pilbara region of Western Australia, the situation isn't…
March 9, 2007
I was deeply heartened that my post on the IPCC communication failure from a while back prompted valuable commentary on this blog. One comment in particular was so useful and constructive that I'm reproducing it in its entirety here as a way of prompting further discussion.
I had written that when…
March 9, 2007
Here we go again. This devastating storm, which rapidly intensified yesterday before striking Port Hedland in northwestern Australia, was estimated to have 110 knot sustained winds by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. 115 knot winds are the cutoff for a Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Scale…
March 8, 2007
So: Searchles has created an awesome new widget that I'm sure is going to catch on like wildfire. It has allowed me to create a web "channel" where all of my various YouTube and Google videos can be shown on one screen. When new videos come online, I can also change the order in which they…
March 8, 2007
This one rapidly intensified prior to landfall, apparently all the way to borderline Category 3/Category 4 strength just before striking to the east of Port Hedland. In other words, the intensity forecasts undershot considerably....and we'll soon find out just how damaging George actually was,…