cmooney | March 20, 2006The 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 the time to stand up and be counted....
cmooney | March 19, 2006Yikes. 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 being very tiny, yet nevertheless very deadly. In fact, if you go the Wikipedia link for Tracy, there's a fascinating image comparing this storm with the biggest typhoon ever recorded, 1979's Super Typhoon Tip. Tip was the size of the entire Western half of the United States. By comparison, Tracy was…
cmooney | March 17, 2006Seriously, 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 length) to actually start serious work on his new book project (for the latest hurricanes/global warming post, see here). In the interest of sanity and productivity alike, I really need a few less things on my plate for a bit. But I'll be back before too long....
cmooney | March 16, 2006In 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 area of low pressure to create a cyclonic rotation (a phenomenon known as the Coriolis effect). Second, you need a temperature gradient between the warm ocean surface and the cooler atmosphere above it, a situation that's favorable to what meteorologists call convection (the transfer of heat upward…
cmooney | March 16, 2006American 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 influence our political system, lacking voting representation in Congress. It's an outrageous situation, but one that is continually perpetuated. I wrote about it for my very first article in The American Prospect, back in 2000--the story is even worse in Puerto Rico. And nobody ever talks about it.
cmooney | March 16, 2006This 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, we're up against Elizabeth Kolbert's three part New Yorker series on global warming in this category, so winning hardly seems assured--but, again, it's an honor to be nominated.
cmooney | March 15, 2006Hmm, 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 Burke were uncomfortable with the Enlightenment. This got me taken to task by Adam Keiper in National Review, who said I'd taken Burke out of context:
First, the quotation from Burke is not at all a denunciation of the Enlightenment. In context, Burke is lamenting the decline of chivalry and condemning…
cmooney | March 15, 2006A 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.
cmooney | March 15, 2006The 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. (What data? Er, I don't know precisely, but trust me, they have it.)
Anyway, that's why I've been watching the fate of Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers and Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes From a Catastrophe quite closely. Neither has appeared on any bestseller lists yet, so far as I know. But…
cmooney | March 15, 2006The 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 surface temperatures are above average, La Nina has returned and the Atlantic Basin remains in an 'up' cycle for storms." An El Nino in the Pacific tends to suppress hurricanes in the Atlantic, but with La Nina it's the opposite. Anyway, it's still early--but it doesn't sound like there's much to be…
cmooney | March 14, 2006I 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 comprehensively updating would be a futile endeavor. Instead, most of the new information will be contained in the new foreword. But, inevitably, there are numerous things that will need changing because they are dated or no longer true. For instance, in the book I asserted that Bush had not yet taken a position…
cmooney | March 14, 2006This 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 administration that is behaving in such a constructive manner. Nevertheless, it's a start.
The agency to be commended appears to be NASA, which is going to let its scientists speak freely (as long as they don't claim to represent the agency) and which is being praised by said scientists for doing so.…
cmooney | March 13, 2006For 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 by White House official Philip Cooney, who subsequently resigned and, as pretty much everyone now knows, went to work for ExxonMobil.
Now Piltz has launched a website, entitled "Climate Science Watch," that's full of goodies like this. For one thing, he has exposed a troubling inquiry by Senator…
cmooney | March 9, 2006Dear 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 Animal Kingdom (W.W. Norton)
Mariana Gosnell, Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance (Alfred A. Knopf)
Brad Matsen, Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss (Pantheon Books)
Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (Basic Books)
Diana Preston, Before the Fallout…
cmooney | March 8, 2006I'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 soon.
Meanwhile, all of you who haven't already, meet my brother Davy, via this article that mentioned him in the New York Times:
HEADLINE: Picking a Guitarist, Fluent in Monk and More
BYLINE: By NATE CHINEN
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 20
BODY:
The organizers of the Thelonious Monk International…
cmooney | March 8, 2006It'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 miscategorized as spam...and so forth. Big headache. Hopefully all of the real comments have now been published, and hopefully my spam filter will not swallow up any more of them.
However, there will be times in the future--and in fact there have been times in the past--when certain non-spam comments do…
cmooney | March 8, 2006A 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 outbreak.
Recently I heard from Siegel, who wrote in to clarify his position and invited me to post his email. Here's what he had to say:
Dear Chris,
thanks for mentioning my new book on your blog in what i thought was a very respectful way.
FYI - i am actually in favor of emergency supplies of food and…
cmooney | March 7, 2006Again, 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.
cmooney | March 6, 2006I 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 wasn't busy taking on Joe McCarthy, he took time out to broadcast from a flight into Hurricane Edna, in 1954. Apparently the broadcast included this deeply memorable quotation:
In the eye of a hurricane, you learn things other than of a scientific nature. You feel the puniness of man and his works.…
cmooney | March 6, 2006I 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 of ecosystem restoration. "The ultimate test of sustainable development," he called it.
We've already lost half of the original Everglades, but late in the Clinton years a huge, bipartisan restoration plan was put in place. Saving the Everglades is now popular, uncontroversial, and well-funded. Yet…