cmooney | April 4, 2006Today I'm working on updates to Chapter 9 of my book, which is divided up into sections about misuses of science to favor food industry interests and misuses of science to deny the dangers of mercury pollution and contamination of fish. The chapter itself is entitled "Eating Away at Science." However, it has been a very difficult one to update: There don't seem to have been many major developments in either of these stories in the past year or year and a half. Or am I missing something?
Your thoughts appreciated.
cmooney | April 3, 2006When it comes to global warming and prominent national columnists, there's probably no one with his head further crammed into the sand than George Will. Anyway, there's no need for me to debunk his latest nonsense, Real Climate and the Progress Report have already done a great job. But hey, Will can get the science wrong all he wants to--it's just "opinion," right?
cmooney | April 3, 2006Sometimes I hear a slight bit of trash talk about how my "war on science" message goes down smoothest on the two left coasts. There's some truth to the claim, but I certainly haven't been avoiding other parts of the USA--and my events this week prove it. I'm doing the heartland, the swing states--Ohio and Michigan. (Granted, I'm still speaking on college campuses, which are little left coasts of their own.) Anyway, here's the rundown:
Wednesday, April 5
7:00 PM-8:30 PM
Edward Lamb Peace Lecture followed by Book Signing
Bowling Green State University
Bowen Thompson Student Union Theater, Room…
cmooney | April 1, 2006This op-ed in today's New York Times, by "End of Environmentalism" prophets Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, is seriously weak. Actually, I would go so far as to call it lame. To wit:
We can agree to disagree on the causes of climate change. What we all must agree on, though, is that it poses a risk -- one for which we are woefully unprepared.
Yeah, right. If what we're seeing is natural that implies that it will go away. If what we're seeing is human caused that means it won't go away unless we clean up our act. The risk is therefore not the same, not by a long shot. That makes the…
cmooney | March 31, 2006NASA is to be commended for a new media policy easing up restrictions on scientist communications. Most importantly, scientists don't have to have little PR minders on their phone calls any more. Bravo. See here to learn more about the policy.
NASA's move is entirely positive--it represents progress. Still, it's pretty scant progress in light of years and years of abuses against science perpetrated by the Bush administration, and the wide range of agencies where these problems have manifested. The great danger, now, is that NASA will be pointed to as a success story in order to neutralize…
cmooney | March 31, 2006I am still busy at work revising The Republican War on Science for the paperback edition. Now the plan is to have both a new author preface, and then also to have updates at the end of most of the body chapters. And to complete this project, I am seeking more feedback.
Today I'm working on updates related to climate change--political science events that happened in this area from roughly mid 2005 up through the present. There have been quite a lot of them, but I have most prominently identified the following:
Whistleblower Rick Piltz's exposure of political editing of scientific reports at…
cmooney | March 30, 2006Via the Progress Report, I see that George W. Bush is sounding more and more like an out-and-out greenhouse skeptic. Perhaps his meeting with Michael Crichton influenced him? From Bush's recent press conference:
Q From Australia. I've got a question about global warming -- in the Australian Parliament, Tony Blair called for greater action. And this seems to be something that the U.S. President could make a major difference on. There's a virtual consensus that the planet is warming. If you addressed issues like emissions, fuel efficiency, issues to do with alternative energy in your last few…
cmooney | March 30, 2006Over at Prometheus, Roger Pielke, Jr., has an interesting post taking Kevin Trenberth to task for discussing how global warming may have increased Katrina's total rainfall and thus caused direct damage to New Orleans. Pielke doesn't think Trenberth can justifiably say this, although previously (I forget the exact link) I seem to recall that folks at RealClimate had defended Trenberth's back-of-the-envelope calculation.
I don't know enough at this point to have an opinion about the validity of what Trenberth said. However, irrespective of Trenberth's claim, I do wonder whether or not it will…
cmooney | March 27, 2006Over at the excellent blog Crooked Timber, a lengthy and extremely productive seminar discussion has just gone online about my book, with contributions from John Quiggin, Daniel Davies, Ted Barlow, John Holbo, Steve Fuller (of Dover evolution trial fame), Tim Lambert, Henry Farrell, and John Quiggin again--all followed by a lengthy response from yours truly. I'll have more to say on this soon, but I hope you will dig in to this excellent discussion, starting out with the seminar introduction by John Quiggin....
cmooney | March 26, 2006Here's a longer excerpt from that Time cover story--up through the full second paragraph:
No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry-a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180 m.p.h.-exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains…
cmooney | March 26, 2006Just for the record (and since everybody's doing it), my blog owns 18.25 percent of me. I expected it would be much worse. I can't imagine how PZ could have gotten 6.25 percent, given that he posts much more frequently than I do. He must be super efficient....
(If you're confused what I'm talking about, see here for the latest quiz that's making the rounds on ScienceBlogs).
cmooney | March 26, 2006The latest Time magazine cover reads, "Be Worried. Be Very Worried." Inside, Jeffrey Kluger's cover story begins:
No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
Wow. A Time magazine cover telling us to be scared, immediately, of global warming. I can't possibly exaggerate just how huge a deal this is.
There's been increasing momentum behind the global warming issue in…
cmooney | March 25, 2006Tomorrow I am off to New York for this meeting on hurricanes and climate, sponsored by Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society. I'm very appreciative that Columbia-IRI has allowed me to attend the event, which will feature presentations from Kerry Emanuel, Chris Landsea, Roger Pielke, Jr., Thomas Knutson, and numerous others.
I will be back late Wednesday; blogging will probably be impaired during the trip. So let me leave you with something substantive before I go:
It turns out that another presenter at the Columbia meeting will be Johnny C.L. Chan, an…
cmooney | March 24, 2006I have just found out that an edition of The Republican War on Science is coming out in South Korea, and I have to write an introduction to it. I'm supposed to address the book to South Koreans, and obviously I should say something about the central issue of embryonic stem cell research--but beyond that, I'm at a loss. I don't know anything about how the South Korean government relates to science, for example. I know enough to know that many South Koreans are concerned about the state of affairs in the U.S., but I doubt that's enough to really write an authentic introduction. I am suddenly…
cmooney | March 23, 2006I really, really enjoyed Elizabeth Kolbert's new book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe. I gave it a nice little review/plug in Seed. I would recommend it to anyone.
Still, I must say, I was staggered to read on the book's Amazon page the following editorial review (it's unclear who from): "An argument for the urgent danger of global warming in a book that is sure to be as influential as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring."
Er...Silent Spring is probably most influential environmental book of the 20th century (Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac may be a close runner up). Carson herself was…
cmooney | March 23, 2006I am psyched to be among the list of speakers for a great upcoming conference on "Bioethics & Politics: The Future of Bioethics in a Divided Democracy," sponsored by the Alden March Bioethics Institute of Albany Medical College. Other confirmed speakers include:
Nigel Cameron
Arthur Caplan
Alta Charo
Eric Cohen
Richard Doerflinger
James Fossett
Jeffrey Kahn
Glenn McGee
David Magnus
Jonathan Moreno
Alicia Ouellette
Sean Philpott
William F. May
Wesley Smith
Bonnie Steinbock
Gerald and Paul Root Wolpe
Laurie Zoloth
You will note that the event represents both the left and the right. It's…
cmooney | March 23, 2006Tim 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 that books on global warming are not a waste of their time, this is a truly heartening sign....
P.S.: If Flannery's book on global warming is doing well, just wait until Al Gore's comes out....
cmooney | March 21, 2006Not 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 scientific research organization, is expecting that the country will indeed have to deal with stronger cyclones due to global warming in the future. But here's the catch--based upon its own modeling studies, CSIRO is also expecting to see less storms in total.
CSIRO's models aren't the only ones that…
cmooney | March 21, 2006I'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 opportunity in this anomalous fact. By studying--I shit you not--how fast you have to send a chicken flying through the air in order for its feathers to be pulled off, Loomis figured he could deduce the wind speed of a tornado. And yes, the experiment involved a cannon. Here's Loomis's report:
As the gun…
cmooney | March 20, 2006Again, 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....