cmooney | June 15, 2006Okay, here's round two of Bethell mania. Once again, I'm going to post several brief excerpts from his arguments (this time on evolution), and let you respond to them--thereby helping me out with my debate prep. You did a stellar job with global warming, so I expect no less this time around!
Here goes:
1. In the evolutionist worldview, life on earth evolved from inanimate matter over a long period as a result of random events. If it really is true that all creatures great and small appeared on earth in this fashion, then we have no reason to believe that life is anything other than a cosmic…
cmooney | June 15, 2006Seeing as I'm debating Bethell on NPR's Science Friday tomorrow, I thought I would begin the warm-up session here by posting some samples of what he's had to say about various scientific topics, starting with the biggie--global warming. I am not going to comment on these passages; I'm simply going to list three quotes, number them, and then leave the rest up to you folks. You were excellent when it came to helping me prep to debate Ron Bailey, so I'm sure you will be equally awesome this time around.
Here goes:
1. It is often said: If we don't know whether to take an umbrella to work, how can…
cmooney | June 15, 2006Just realized that the paperback version of the book is already available for preorder on Amazon.com (and probably elsewhere). See here. I've changed my book link on the left hand margin to go to the paperback preorder page, rather than to the hardcover page as it has done for the last nine months or so. The paperback itself will be out towards the end of August.
Note: For the hardcover version of The Republican War on Science, online pre-orders were a big factor in building momentum for the book. I even made Amazon's list for most pre-ordered titles. For the paperback, I'm not going to push…
cmooney | June 14, 2006Jeff Masters gives us a useful rundown on Alberto's life history; here's the part I find most interesting:
Alberto formed from a tropical wave that moved off of the coast of Africa on May 30. The wave tracked farther north than usual for June, entering the eastern Caribbean on June 5, and the western Caribbean on June 8. The wave interacted with the unsettled weather of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), which has been able to push unusually far north for this time of year. The interaction between the ITCZ and the African wave produced Alberto on June 9. It is uncommon for a June…
cmooney | June 14, 2006From hurricane guru Jeff Masters: "It could be an exceptionally active June." He's promising to explain why he thinks so later today. If he's right, it's certainly not good news for New Orleans, still with crippled levees, and where I'm headed this Saturday...
cmooney | June 13, 2006Got some news, folks: I'm going to be on NPR's Science Friday with Ira Flatow, this Friday, from 3:15 to 4:00 ET, debating Tom Bethell about the politics of science. If you want to call in, the number is (800) 989-8255. It's not up on the website yet that this is happening but I can confirm it. The show's website, incidentally, is here.
Meanwhile, in advance of the paperback release, we've set up a lot of new book tour dates in September. I'm going back to the West Coast (San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle), but also to a number of places where I've never given talks before (Madison…
cmooney | June 13, 2006Seed has just posted my column from the latest issue. It's a piece in which I try to grapple with the question of why the science/politics issue has become such a big deal--much bigger than even I anticipated (and I had every reason to overestimate its potency). The answer, I conclude, can be summarized as follows: "George W. Bush." As I put it:
The "Bush is anti science" meme carries political weight because it underscores why so many Americans (including previous supporters) are becoming increasingly disenchanted with Bush: They don't think he's fit to lead, and they don't believe many of…
cmooney | June 12, 2006The line of demarcation between a tropical storm and a hurricane is, obviously, somewhat arbitrary in nature. Why should the official cutoff point be sustained winds of 74 miles per hour, rather than 73 mph or 75 mph? Defined in terms of their true meteorological species, all three storms are tropical cyclones--period.
From a psychological point of view, however, the question of whether Florida gets hit by a "hurricane" this early in the season, as opposed to a mere "tropical storm," obviously makes a lot of difference. So that's what everyone is going to be watching for. The latest advisory…
cmooney | June 12, 2006As I was traveling through various airports yesterday, I couldn't help hearing about Tropical Depression, and then Tropical Storm, and now what may possibly become Hurricane Alberto. Or not. We just don't know yet, but a reading of the National Hurricane Center's archived discussions of the storm shows that so far, it has surprised forecasters and intensified when they didn't expect it to do so. And as forecaster Pasch put it at 11 AM EDT today:
GIVEN THE UNCERTAINTIES IN PREDICTING INTENSITY CHANGE WE MUST NOW ALLOW FOR THE DISTINCT POSSIBILITY THAT ALBERTO COULD BECOME A HURRICANE.
This…
cmooney | June 12, 2006Check it out here. Key quote: "It's so important that we continue to fight against right-wing efforts to hijack and distort science for their own partisan purposes." Amen to that...
cmooney | June 12, 2006I'm pleased to see that the Las Vegas Sun covered the remarks made by myself and General Clark at the Yearly Kos science panel last Friday. I made sure to give my comments a local hook, and the paper picked up on that. Get ready for a long excerpt:
Mooney specifically criticized President Bush and made passing reference to Nevada congressman Jim Gibbons, a Republican candidate for governor. Mooney noted that Gibbons wrote and released a report last year, with Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., titled "Mercury in Perspective: Fact and Fiction About the Debate Over Mercury."
Billed as an exhaustive…
cmooney | June 9, 2006Wow. The Yearly Kos science panel this morning was awesome, really a tour de force. Facing a full room, Wesley Clark got up there and riffed for at least twenty minutes, with impressive eloquence, about the importance of science to the American future. I wish I'd been taking notes. Here's a guy whose past--unbeknownst to me--had a lot of science in it; he's a kid of the Sputnik era, and really grasps how far we've fallen from the days when scientific innovation was at the center of America's image of itself. I was very, very impressed. (And I can't complain that at one point, Clark actually…
cmooney | June 7, 2006Well, I've just spent three days writing...the "manuscript" is starting to actually look like something where the scare quotes can be removed around that word....But now I must shift into public speaking mode again. Tomorrow the rent car and I will be heading from Flagstaff slightly northwest to Las Vegas, which should make for a very pretty drive. I'm not sure if I'll get to Sin City in time for the Yearly Kos Science Bloggers Caucus tomorrow (schedule here), but I will certainly be ready to speak alongside PZ, General Clark, and Wendy Northcutt Friday morning. More generally, I am getting…
cmooney | June 5, 2006Well, my old website, ChrisCMooney.com, has been hacked. I have no idea how to deal with it. I meant to set the old URL up to redirect here, but I have been way too busy to set that up...and now the problems are compounded. Will someone please email me if they can help out with this?
cmooney | June 3, 2006Well, the event yesterday at the Skeptics Society conference here in Pasadena went very well, I think. I'm not going to speculate on who "won" the debate between Ron Bailey and myself, but certainly a lot of people came up to me afterwards and thanked me for what I had to say.
I won't give you the full rundown here, but I will provide a written out version of roughly what I had to say in my opening remarks at the debate--comments directly inspired by the "controversy" on this blog over this conference and who the keynote speakers are (Michael Crichton and John Stossel). Here are my comments (…
cmooney | June 1, 2006Part of debating, of course, is knowing your opponent. In the case of Ron Bailey, I've appeared at three separate events with him in the past, so we do know each other's arguments fairly well. Still, I've done a little background research now that we're going to be going head-on (we've been more orthagonally aligned at the other events). And since I know there are some good brains out there, here's your chance to react to specific arguments by Bailey that I've dug up...
First, Bailey has a long record of criticizing 1970s environmnentalists (the old school types) for exaggerating potential…
cmooney | June 1, 2006That's the contention of a group called the U.S. Climate Emergency Council, whose protest--outside of the offices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration--I attended yesterday. It's headed by Mike Tidwell, a writer and global warming activist who has a book coming out on all of this.
I must say, the contention that Mayfield (director of the National Hurricane Center) ought to resign because NOAA is not taking the stance that hurricanes are already stronger due to global warming struck me as rather over-the-top. I guess I largely (although not entirely) agree with Kevin Vranes…
cmooney | June 1, 2006Well, folks, I'm off to Pasadena tomorrow; the debate with Ron Bailey is Saturday. I may blog more about it here if I need feedback on any particular point as I prep my arguments today and, once I arrive at the hotel in Pasadena, tomorrow.
Meanwhile, as thing are likely to be bumpy, here is what you can expect from me for the rest of the month blog- and speech-wise; turns out I'm venturing into a lot of new areas:
June 4-8: After Pasadena, I am retreating to a family house north of Flagstaff, Arizona to get some writing done. No Internet, may not even be a phone. So there will definitely be…
cmooney | June 1, 2006Check out Jeff Masters, especially this entry here, where he explains why we are not going to see any early season storms this year (too much wind shear). I'm adding him to the blogroll.
cmooney | May 31, 2006Two new studies on the hurricane-global warming relationship are just out, reported on here by the New York Times. I haven't seen the Purdue study yet. The other study, by Michael Mann and Kerry Emanuel, has already been discussed at scientific conferences and even reported on by some journalists. Mann and Emanuel suggest that contrary to previous claims about a natural "cycle" in Atlantic hurricane activity, it may be that the mid-century downturn in storms was partly the result of human-caused "global cooling" due to sulfate areosol pollution. The implication is that now that the Clean Air…