cmooney_2 | May 17, 2007
On May 3, as part of the annual AAAS Forum on Science & Technology Policy, retired Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), the former chair of the House Science & Technology committee, gave the keynote William Carey lecture (full text). In his address, he devoted several pages of his speech to our Policy Forum article at Science and our Sunday Outlook commentary at the Washington Post.
We've long admired Congressman Boehlert's work on science, technology, and the environment, and we deeply respect his commitment to scientific advice and bi-partisan policy making. The scientific…
cmooney | May 17, 2007
Projected track of Cyclone Pierre--currently pointing toward Queensland. Image courtesy of the Bureau of Meteorology, Brisbane Centre.
The Australian cyclone season this year has been very quiet, and was supposed to be over April 30.
Never mind. Cyclone Pierre has other ideas.
This storm is now heading towards the populous Queensland region, and forecast to intensify slowly but steadily at this point. It bears serious watching.....
cmooney | May 16, 2007
Folks: After checking with my publisher, Basic Books, I'm pleased to announce that my first book, The Republican War on Science, has sold 50,000 copies (counting hardcover, paperback, translations, etc). Thanks to all of you who picked up one or more of those copies, and I hope you enjoyed it.
This of course sets a fairly high bar for the next book, Storm World, due out on July 9. But for what it's worth, I actually feel that with Storm World I've matured as a writer and delivered what is, in many ways, a better book. We'll see if readers agree....
cmooney | 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 over a funny movie that in many ways goes just as hard on scientists as it does on the ID folks.
cmooney | 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 missing. Thousands of homes were damaged as well.
In this part of the world, we are just extremely lucky that Akash wasn't a more intense cyclone.
Meanwhile, this is shaping up to be a year of storms forming out of season: We had a very early Andrea in the Atlantic, and now it looks like just when you…
cmooney | May 15, 2007The 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 Rosenhouse. His post on the event is here.
Meanwhile, our own report (including some pictures) is here.
Finally, in other news, I'm close to being able to announce who my guest blogger (or bloggers) are going to be.....
cmooney_2 | May 15, 2007
So here's the bad news: This picture of Matt is probably the only reasonably good one from our latest talk, at the American Institute of Biological Sciences annual meeting yesterday.
But here's the good news: The entire talk was recorded and should be available soon enough on YouTube. We're looking forward to it coming online, and will let you know forthwith when it does so.
In the audience this time were a number of AAAS fellows (won't embarrass them by naming names), climate science whistleblower Rick Piltz (ClimateScienceWatch.org author), and fellow ScienceBlogger Jason Rosenhouse. As…
cmooney | 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 saying the current storm, known only as 01B, is going to turn out anything like that. But whenever you see one headed towards Bangladesh you tend to worry. In the case of the present cyclone, it's still only a strong tropical storm, and doesn't look like it has much time to intensify before…
cmooney | May 13, 2007I'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, I'd like to have a guest blogger take my place. If you'd like to be that guest blogger, leave a comment or send me an email (and give at least some explanation as to why you're interested).
Note: Assuming that multiple folks want to take over here for a week, the guest blogger I pick will be the…
cmooney | 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 of Biological Sciences. Details here.
cmooney_2 | May 12, 2007Matt Nisbet and I just got back yesterday from our first trip together to do a joint talk: At the spectacularly impressive Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri. The public event (followed by a solo "war on science" dinner's speech by yours truly to the Stowers Institute's principal investigators) went very well. We hope it's the start of great things to come.
Below, a few pictures from the trip...
Professor Nisbet goes over his talk at the D.C. airport before we catch our flight to Kansas City. (Er, just kidding, he's grading papers.)
Whoa. The Stowers Institute…
cmooney | 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 HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
905 AM EDT WED MAY 9 2007
SATELLITE IMAGERY AND PRELIMINARY REPORTS FROM AN AIR FORCE RESERVE RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT THIS MORNING INDICATE THAT THE AREA OF LOW PRESSURE CENTERED ABOUT 150 MILES EAST OF JACKSONVILLE IS ACQUIRING THE CHARACTERISTICS OF A SUBTROPICAL CYCLONE.…
cmooney_2 | May 7, 2007
On April 6, 2007, 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, while always remaining true to the science, should "frame" issues and topics in ways that make them personally relevant to broader audiences.
The response was overwhelming. There was some controversy; there were also many endorsements.
Most of all, there were many calls, from bloggers and other commentators, for us to expand upon…
cmooney | 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, while always remaining true to the science, should "frame" issues and topics in ways that make them personally relevant to broader audiences.
The response was overwhelming. There was controversy; there were also many endorsements.
Most of all, there were many calls, from bloggers and other commentators…
cmooney | May 4, 2007Last 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 fellow blogger American University's Matt Nisbet, recently wrote two pieces for Science and The Washington Post, in which they engaged in a little Science Studies 101, pointing out that how issues are framed influences how they are received. Seems pretty straightforward. But in their piece they…
cmooney | 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, with a grain of salt.
Nevertheless, we now have two more forecasts predicting--as previous forecasts have consistently done--a quite active Atlantic hurricane season.
One just released forecast comes from Tropical Storm Risk (PDF), a group whose methodology relies upon assessing sea-surface…
cmooney | May 3, 2007In 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:
cmooney | May 3, 2007Via 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 a moderate, someone who accepts some human caused global warming but who isn't an alarmist like Al Gore and those wacky environmentalists. There's just one problem with this stance: Hayward was aiming straight at the scientific consensus as recently as two years ago:
What do we actually know? The…
cmooney | 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 vulnerable regions of the Gulf and East Coasts.
The gory tour details are now available here (a stopgap location until the official Storm World website is ready to go). For the blog, meanwhile, I will merely list, in chronological order, the cities I'm currently scheduled to visit to talk about…
cmooney | 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 France).
Let's look at the two other relevant regions first. Different divisions are possible, but Wikipedia breaks them into the Australian region and the South Pacific. During the 2006-2007 season, each of these areas saw relatively little activity, save for one kickass storm apiece. For the…