cmooney
Posts by this author
Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers is at # 18 overall on Amazon.com this morning, presumably boosted dramatically by an appearance on "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross yesterday. He now has a shot at making the New York Times bestseller list. For those of us trying to convince the publishing industry…
Not surprisingly, in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Larry Australians are beginning to chatter about possible links between global warming and hurricanes. And in at least one venue (The Age), the discussion has taken an interesting turn.
Specifically, it appears that CSIRO, Australia's national…
I've been reading a book by James Rodger Fleming entitled Meteorology in America, 1800-1870. In it, he describes how mid-19th century scientists were intrigued by the fact that tornadoes seemed to leave barnyard fowl stripped of their feathers. One intrepid researcher, Elias Loomis, saw an…
Again, I'll be speaking this Wednesday at an event sponsored by the Alliance for Science in Vienna, Virginia at 7:30 pm. Details here. Hope some of yous can make it....
The Dem from North Carolina is asking for more evidence of scientific suppression in the Bush administration, in the interest of getting Sherry Boehlert of the House Committee on Science to hold hearings. Go Brad! If you're a government scientist and you've got a story to tell Rep. Miller, now's…
Yikes. Australia got slammed today, or yesterday--not sure as to the timing, but it was apparently a Category 5 storm, perhaps even up to the time of landfall. Australia's last really big one was Tropical Cyclone Tracy, which devastated the city of Darwin in 1974, and which had the distinction of…
Seriously, wouldn't it be cool if I was capable of writing a substantive post on this subject? Or better yet, a book? It would be a bestseller.
But alas, I can't. All I can say is this: Happy St. Patrick's Day. And on that note, this 1/4 Irishman is taking a much-needed blog hiatus (at least a week…
In order to get a tropical cyclone spinning, a lot of things have to go right (or wrong, depending upon your perspective). First, you need a location that's warm but also a certain distance north or south of the equator. In places too close to latitude zero, winds won't swirl inwards towards an…
American colonialism strikes again. It turns out that Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho has received $ 39,000 in donations recently from the U.S. Virgin Islands, double what he received from his own constituents. Why do the U.S. "territories" give so much political cash? Because that's the only way they can…
This has been a good couple of weeks. I've just learned that Mother Jones has been nominated for a National Magazine Award in the "public interest" category for their May 2005 feature on global warming, which included an article by yours truly about ExxonMobil and conservative think tanks. Anyway,…
Hmm, sounds like a reference to the gang here at ScienceBlogs, no?
Seriously, though: It's a quotation from Edmund Burke. You see, I'm in the process of revising RWoS, and it turns out I had used this quotation from "Reflections on the Revolution in France" to point out how conservatives like…
A new group called the Alliance for Science is bringing me out to Vienna, Virginia, for a talk next Wednesday night, the 22nd. For those in the DC area who haven't been able to make it to an event yet, this is a great opportunity. Further information here, and I'll have another reminder next week.
The publishing industry is fairly well known for being afraid of nonfiction environmental books, especially on subjects like global warming. What a snooze, publishers often think. Moreover, they have data to show that a number of books on this subject have not sold particularly well in the past. (…
The prognostications are starting to roll in for the upcoming hurricane season, which officially begins June 1 (although really, and as we saw last year, the start and end dates are a bit arbitrary). So far, there's not a lot of optimism. According to reporting by the St. Petersburg Times: "Sea…
I just learned that I have, like, three weeks to make all changes to my book in time for the paperback version--and to write a new introduction to boot. So much has happened in the world of politics-and-science since late August when RWoS first came out in hardback that the notion of…
This is a heady day. For the first time, perhaps, we can actually say that the Bush administration, charged with some type of interference with science, has responded by cleaning up its act, rather than by denying or ignoring that the problem exists. Alas, it's really only a small sliver of the…
For those of you who don't know of him already, Rick Piltz is one of the many science whistleblowers to run screaming from the Bush administration. I've written about him here. Formerly of the Climate Change Science Program, Piltz famously drew attention to the editing of government climate reports…
Dear friends: I'm ecstatic to announce that my first book was just named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize for 2005 in the category of "science and technology." The five finalists are:
Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the…
I'm leaving Westchester this morning and heading down south to stay with my brother, his wife, and their we-think Tibetan terrier in Crown Heights. On Thursday I'm heading into the city for I-can't-say-what-yet, but suffice it to say that I will be posting some news on this blog relating to that…
It's high time that I make a note about how comments are handled on this blog. This has been made particularly urgent by the fact that I was until recently getting an overwhelming amount of spam comments, which in turn led me to up the spam filter, which in turn led some real comments to be…
A while back I did a post about Mark Siegel, the author of the book Bird Flu, which received a number of comments. Among those, Tara took Siegel to task for appearing to suggest, in the Washington Post, that there's no need to prepare emergency supplies of food and water in anticipation of an…
Again, I'm speaking tonight at SUNY-Purchase, aka Purchase College of the State University of New York. Then I'll be in New York for a couple of days, followed by Atlanta. Blogging could be a mite spotty, but I know you'll all bear with me.
I watched the Oscars last night, and was rather ticked off when Good Night, and Good Luck got skunked. It was a great film, in my opinion, and carries an extremely important message at the present moment.
I was even more annoyed once I found out something else about CBS's Edward R. Murrow: When he…
I just started reading Michael Grunwald's book on the Everglades, The Swamp, after hearing him speak last week and picking up a copy afterwards. It sounds like a fascinating read, especially since Grunwald in his talk framed the story of the Everglades as a momentous trial by fire for the concept…
Last week, in a post that got a fair amount of attention, I observed that we may well have a global warming case heading towards the Supreme Court. In the comments thread, the issue then quickly arose: Is that a good thing? Is it something that we ought to be drawing attention to? Could drawing…
I haven't read the latest issue of Harper's magazine, but apparently it contains a major article challenging the notion that HIV causes AIDS, as well as discounting the severity of the African AIDS epidemic. This is very troubling, especially since Harper's editor Lewis Lapham has generally been a…
I've managed to fill up the next three months--and especially April--with a number of speaking engagements, including my first real swing through the Midwest, with talks at Bowling Green (April 5), Michigan State (April 6), and Kalamazoo College (April 7). Meanwhile, there are also some really fun…
This is just a post to thank everyone for the many, many great comments on my recent post about Firefly. As you can see, I am doing my part to evangelize for Firefly/Serenity and spread the word to a few more viewers. (My brother will be getting all 5 DVDs as a gift soon.) In this way, we can all…
Last summer, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected a lawsuit challenging the EPA's failure to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, two judges on the court paraded their scientific ignorance. As I've previously shown at length, Judge A. Raymond Randolph…
From today's Post piece on the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet:
But some scientists remain unconvinced. Oregon state climatologist George Taylor noted that sea ice in some areas of Antarctica is expanding and part of the region is getting colder, despite computer models that would predict…