cmooney
Posts by this author
February 1, 2007
Guess you can watch it yourself. His remarks about The Republican War on Science are very complimentary.
February 1, 2007
I've just updated my public talks page, and am psyched to announce that I'm truly going international this year. Already there are two events scheduled in Vancouver, and I'm taking part in a plenary session on "Biasing Scientific Information" at the World Conference of Science Journalists, this…
February 1, 2007
As Roger Pielke, Jr., has already noted, word has it that the new IPCC report will say that hurricanes have measurably intensified due to global warming. Roger warns that, if true, this will cause huge controversy. I would go even further and say that if true--and that's still a huge caveat at…
February 1, 2007
Naomi Oreskes has an op-ed in the Post this morning on this subject, in anticipation of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report release tomorrow. I went over a lot of this ground in researching the new book, and there's one detail I can never get over. John Tyndall discovered what we now think of as the…
January 31, 2007
Some wit once said something like, "My pessimism extends so far as to suspect the sincerity of the pessimists." As we witness a flurry of activity concerning global warming on Capitol Hill--and with the IPCC report just days from emerging--that's the outlook I'd like to apply to the climate issue.…
January 31, 2007
A very interesting issue--discussed in comments here and here--has arisen over one aspect of Roger Pielke, Jr.'s testimony yesterday. In that testimony (PDF), Pielke suggested that Waxman's committee had cherry-picked science with the following statement in a memorandum (the original of which I…
January 31, 2007
Cyclone Dora, in the South Indian basin, was estimated to have 75 knot or about 86 mile per hour maximum sustained winds in the latest advisory from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. That's significantly stronger than any storm yet in 2007, and Dora is expected to intensify further. The storm does…
January 31, 2007
Iain Murray is repeating the lame argument made by Darrell Issa at the Waxman hearing yesterday:
The UCS mailed out over 1600 survey forms to climate scientists and based their assertions of political interference on the 297 that got returned. That's a response rate of just 19 percent. OMB…
January 30, 2007
Here's hard proof of the RWOS brandishing that I spoke of earlier. I assure you, I had nothing to do with this, but then, I don't exactly object, either.
Apparently Rep. Cooper also had some pretty revealing comments in his opening statement to the Waxman hearing. ThinkProgress has more.
UPDATE:…
January 30, 2007
Well, I got off jury duty and managed to get over to the Hill after all. As I write this, the Waxman hearing is still ongoing, and you can watch it here. I have it on good authority from three people that in the opening statements, Rep. Jim Cooper, a Democrat, actually waved a copy of The…
January 30, 2007
Oh well. There's a very important politicization of science hearing (PDF) on the Hill this morning in about an hour, and jury duty is going to prevent me from going. I haven't been picked for a trial yet, but my last "voir dire" also didn't end by the end of the day yesterday...and the Superior…
January 29, 2007
While I was battling through the snow on my way to Ithaca to give a talk about my new book, my old one was prompting quite a stir over at the Volokh Conspiracy. Jonathan Adler has done a lengthy, critical review of the book for the journal Regulation, published by the Cato Institute, and that's…
January 27, 2007
In essence, it went like this: Getting to and from Ithaca was a !!%$^# nightmare.
But once I got there, the talk went extremely well.
I won't bother you with all the details about how my flight to Ithaca from LaGuardia, and my back-up flight to Syracuse, were both canceled. About how I then…
January 25, 2007
Well, I am off to Ithaca today to deliver my first major talk (tomorrow) on the subject of hurricanes and global warming, sponsored by the Cornell Department of Communication and co-sponsored by the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology, the Department of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences…
January 24, 2007
Seed just published my take on the State of the Union speech, and the role of global warming therein. In essence, it's a very pessimistic outlook. I really doubt we can expect strong action on the issue until a new administration comes in. The current Congress may pass a few bills outlining various…
January 24, 2007
I am a tad frustrated that I have probable jury duty next week. As result, I may have to miss Henry Waxman's January 30th scheduled hearing "regarding political interference in the work of government climate change scientists." I and many others have been pushing for the new Congress to use its…
January 24, 2007
Bush's treatment of global warming in the State of the Union address was pretty uninspiring, unless you like vagaries. I have a Seed piece going up about this today so I won't say more, except to point out the actual language so you can see for yourself:
America is on the verge of technological…
January 23, 2007
As if there was any doubt....the State of the Union energy/climate policies are already up on the website of the White House. There is some potentially good stuff about renewable fuels and auto efficiency, but there are no mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions in there. There is no "cap and…
January 23, 2007
Well, I have done some quick research, in anticipation of the State of the Union address tonight. I think you folks will get a kick out of this:
2002 SOTU: Mentions of "God": 2. Mentions of "global warming" or "climate change": 0.
2003 SOTU: Mentions of "God": 4. Mentions of "global warming" or "…
January 23, 2007
There's a widespread sense that a change is afoot on the climate issue--so much so, in fact, that some commentators are producing what I view as simplistic accounts of how this came about. See for example Sebastian Mallaby in the Washington Post:
Eight months ago, when Gore's climate documentary…
January 23, 2007
I was just reading a report (PDF) about the damages caused by Hurricane Catarina, a very anomalous event, to Brazil in 2004. The report is written in English but reading through, I rather doubt that's the first language of its authors. I was amused to come across this paragraph in particular:
The…
January 22, 2007
[Huge waves slam the port city of Wimereux in Northern France.]
Last week I griped about how various media organizations were calling the large scale cyclonic system that slammed Europe a "hurricane." In this post, I'd like to be a bit more positive and look more closely at this weather phenomenon…
January 22, 2007
I don't trust the British papers with their various hyperventilating "scoops" about the forthcoming IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. But the Toronto Star just had a story that does sound realistic, reporting on what is purportedly a leaked final draft of the upcoming report's "Summary for…
January 21, 2007
The story goes that when Jule Gregory Charney, at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, ran an early numerical weather prediction in 1953, he and his colleagues managed to correctly hindcast a big snowstorm that had hit Washington, D.C., the previous year (fooling forecasters at the time). The…
January 19, 2007
[Hurricane John of 2006 about to strike Baja California.]
NASA has a new analysis of why the 2006 hurricane season in the Atlantic was much tamer than expected by seasonal forecasters. Interestingly, some of what the agency says contradicts what I've been hearing from other sources. Notably:
1.…
January 19, 2007
Matt Nisbet has the most intriguing speculation I've yet seen as to why the rumors about a global warming policy shift, which I have heretofore discounted, might actually be true. At least one thing seems clear: There will be global warming content in the January 23rd State of the Union address.…
January 18, 2007
One of the great things about having a blog is that you can be completely whimsical, writing about European weather one minute and then family the next. So with that transition, allow me to note that my brother has his first video up on YouTube. It's a fairly short clip of him playing a show at the…
January 18, 2007
This headline from Reuters is really unbelievable: " Hurricane sweeps across Europe." WTF?
The first sentence of the article is even worse: "Germans were told to stay indoors and many schools across the country closed early on Thursday as a rare hurricane bore down on the country, cutting air…
January 18, 2007
The HuffPost has an amusingly written blog entry by David Roberts, of Grist, over all the new-middle-in-the-climate-debate stuff. Roberts thinks I have allowed myself to be co-opted/duped by those wanting to construct a false equivalence between science abusers on different sides of the issue:…
January 17, 2007
[Tracks of the record 28 named storms of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season.]
Something of a subtle shift may be happening in the ongoing hurricane-global warming debate. This was very much on display yesterday in San Antonio during a panel that featured Greg Holland, director of the Mesoscale and…