cmooney
Posts by this author
January 10, 2008
Big news, eh?
No power in the 'verse can stop us...
P.S.: We also added Rep. Jay Inslee today and Kevin Knobloch, President of the Union of Concerned Scientists. And there is more big news coming, of that I can assure you...
January 10, 2008
In my latest DeSmogBlog item, I try to explain the gap between what science says we need to do to stabilize the climate system, and what U.S. politics is currently capable of:
On the one hand, we've now got people like Bill McKibben and James Hansen talking as if 350 parts per million of…
January 9, 2008
When I set out to write my latest Science Progress column about the current status of efforts to restore the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, I have to say I was naive.
I simply thought that with Democrats back in control of Congress, restoring the Republican-killed office would be a…
January 8, 2008
Well, the book has been out for some five months now...but it was just recently reviewed in a top Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Globe & Mail. A quote:
...perhaps the most lasting legacy of Storm World is not its descriptions of hurricane science or politics. Instead, it's Mooney's…
January 8, 2008
In the latest issue of New Scientist, I've got a review of climate change journo Mark Bowen's new book, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming. I have to say, this book is right up my presumed alley, and yet I had a hard time getting…
January 7, 2008
In my latest "Daily Green" column, I find myself slightly praising John Tierney of the New York Times, who is right for the wrong reasons about something he calls "availability entrepreneurs":
Today's interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the…
January 6, 2008
From "Why I Write," a bracingly honest assessment of the scribe's motives:
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake…
January 4, 2008
A propos of the ScienceDebate2008 project, my latest Seed column has just gone online. It's about how we must reinvent the role of the presidential science adviser for the modern media and political era. An excerpt:
Because formal US science advising was born during the Cold War, the emphasis often…
January 3, 2008
Our efforts were recently mentioned in an editorial in Nature:
Election year offers a chance for scientists who aspire to a direct role in the political process to make their voices heard. Prompted by seven years of what they see as manipulation of scientific findings by the Bush administration,…
January 2, 2008
Well, welcome back everyone...I'm in the saddle blogging for the moment, and later today, Sheril and I are going to be hanging out here in LA together. We'll try to post a picture or something.
In the meantime, though, I wanted to post a link to a fun "storm pundit" item I did for the Daily Green…
December 26, 2007
I can't believe the names that have rolled in over the holidays, including a very large number of university presidents:
Warren Baker, President, California Polytechnic State University
Eugene Butcher, Professor of Pathology, Stanford University School of Medicine; Crafoord Prize in Polyarthritis,…
December 23, 2007
It's not like a lot of people are reading blogs right now...but still, I thought I'd get this up before I take the night train to Flagstaff, AZ, where I'm spending Christmas with my mom and sister.
First of all, since last I posted ScienceDebate2008 has (once again) added some extremely impressive…
December 23, 2007
As some of you will no doubt already have noticed, the main ScienceBlogs page now has up a cool feature that runs you through the top scienceblogging subjects of 2007.
Sheril and I are proud to note that the Intersection has been at the epicenter of three of the biggest blogologues from this year…
December 21, 2007
Because we hope to forge a truly broad and bipartisan coalition to push for a presidential debate on science, you can imagine how heartened we were to add the following name:
Calvin DeWittPresident, Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists; Chair, Advisory Council, Evangelical Campaign to…
December 20, 2007
[Tracks of storms in the Northwest Pacific basin, 2007.]
Okay--I realize the year isn't over yet. But I figured it was close enough to start compiling some data on global hurricane activity. Using a cutoff of 35 knot maximum sustained wind speed to identify a storm, here's what I get if you use…
December 20, 2007
I'm pleased to say we brought in the following new endorsers yesterday:
Congressman Vern Ehlers, R-MI, 3rd District, Michigan, Ranking Republican, House Subcommittee on Research & Science Education
Mark Emmert, President, University Of Washington
Harold M. Evans, Author of They Made America:…
December 20, 2007
Winter travel sucks. And I'm doing it anyway.
After spending more or less all of December getting myself as settled as possible here in LA, I now must venture out again next month--and the one after that. Specifically, I'll be in North Carolina, Louisiana, Missouri, and Florida. More details:…
December 19, 2007
Move over, all you monkey trials from primordial American history (and from, like, 2005). Here comes a high stakes whale trial that has been lost to our memories, but that we really should learn about and remember.
I'm talking about the 1818 court case Maurice v. Judd, chronicled in Princeton…
December 19, 2007
ScienceDebate2008 added the following names yesterday:
Sheldon Glashow. The Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979
Geoffrey West, President, Santa Fe Institute, Time 100 list of the 100 most influential people of 2006
Meanwhile, our blogger…
December 18, 2007
We've already heard from Publisher's Weekly and Science Friday...but now the blogs are weighing in.
I'm psyched that the Weather Underground's Jeff Masters, the Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger, and MSNBC's Alan Boyle are all naming Storm World as a top science read from 2007--and recommending it…
December 18, 2007
While Sheril is riling up the geeks, I thought I'd provide the first of what I'm sure will be many updates this week on the ScienceDebate2008 endeavor.
There's immensely heartening news, anywhere you look. The op-ed by myself and Lawrence Krauss announcing this project has now appeared in major…
December 17, 2007
I'm preparing for a KPFA radio interview this morning, and so have had to brush up on precisely what went down in Bali over the past week. In essence: Everything, and nothing.
Global delegates agreed to a plan that (we hope) will eventually lead to a successor to the weak tea and expiring Kyoto…
December 13, 2007
As many of you know already, this week Rep. Henry Waxman's House Oversight Committee came out with a major report on the Bush administration's interference with climate science. Not exactly a new subject, but the Waxman report (PDF) is definitive in the way journalistic accounts often cannot be,…
December 13, 2007
Well it has been a wild ride so far...I wish this was my day job.
ScienceDebate2008 now has, by my count, more than 80 bloggers in our coalition. And honestly, I'm very much afraid that some bloggers seeking to join up may have slipped through the cracks or not been added yet.
And that's just one…
December 13, 2007
In my latest "Science Progress" online column, I've tried for something a little bit off my beaten path. The piece takes, as its starting point, a recent Urban Institute study suggesting (among other things) that contrary to many lamentations from the science community, the real issue is not the…
December 12, 2007
Okay: In the further further interest of promoting a presidential debate on science, Sheril and our ScienceDebate2008 ringleader, Matthew Chapman, have now published a great piece on HuffingtonPost announcing and elaborating on the idea.
Larry Krauss and I, in the LA Times, pretty much made the…
December 12, 2007
Well well well. 15 named storms this year after all. The last (um, we think) is in the Caribbean right now, spinning way past the season's official endpoint. Its name is Olga. It started out subtropical, but has since become a fully tropical storm with maximum sustained winds of 50 knots at its…
December 12, 2007
Folks: In the further interest of promoting a presidential debate on science, there's a joint op-ed in the LA Times today by Lawrence Krauss (one of our top ringleaders) and myself. [It felt really cool, incidentally, to wake up this morning and find my op-ed in my own hometown paper; I haven't had…
December 11, 2007
Some numbers I think say it all:
Number of blogs that have joined our blogger coalition so far: 67Number of blogs that have posted on Science Debate 2008 according to Bora: 60Number of members joining the ScienceDebate2008 Facebook group (as of this post): 457Number of cobloggers without whom this…
December 10, 2007
So, finally, Sheril and I can tell you what we've been working on.
Let's begin with some background: Nearly a month ago, I linked up with Matthew Chapman, the author, screenwriter, and great grandson of Charles Darwin. Chapman, I already knew, had a great idea that I wanted to write about in my…