Some snark from me on my Journal blog about Benny Peiser’s reaction to the new WMO handy hurricane science guide. Some actual non-snarky thoughtful discussion between Benny and myself in the comments on Roger Pielke Jr.’s post on this.
reading 1: Andrew Dessler’s Prometheus post on scientific uncertainty and the making of policy sparked a good discussion. And a copy of his new book, The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change, with Edward Parson, arrived over the weekend. Good so far. reading 2: Back when I first started thinking about drought in the …
I finally slunk into the 21st century this week, purchasing a portable pod device with which to play audio files. The tipping point came when a friend explained that you can get podcasts of Le Show. Nora wisely points out that “podcast” is really just a fancy marketing word for “mp3 file you can download …
It was a Saturday family lunch at the Pie Shack that sealed the deal. Family restaurant decisions are a bit of a tangle at our house, with everyone having preferences and problems getting them all to overlap. An alternative to the usual choices? Let Andrea decide for us. Last month’s ode to the Pie Shack …
Rufus asks: It’s Feb. 16th…. Why haven’t you updated your blog since 2/12????. Good question, Rufus.
A friend sends along Jim Brady’s column from today’s Washington Post: For all the good things it has brought our society, the Web has also fostered ideological hermits, who only talk to folks who believe exactly what they do. This creates an echo chamber that only further convinces people that they are right, and everyone …
Dan Sarewitz is so predictably right that it’s become comical. “(S)cience,” Sarewitz argues, “supplies contesting parties with their own bodies of relevant, legitimated facts about nature, chosen in part because they help make sense of, and are made sensible by, particular interests and normative frameworks.” In the resulting hoohaws, Sarewitz argues, the debate happens on …
By coincidence, I’m drinking my morning coffee from this mug: It’s my favorite mug. Former quarterly (and printed on paper), the Bomb Town News Observer has gone 21st century: This morning my mate came across “Crazy Cat Man,” as we dubbed him, sitting out on the sidewalk in front of his house grinding corn with …
The Santa Ana winds are a fixture of my Southern California childhood – heavy, warm and dry with the hint of smoke and danger. I remember them as a fall phenomenon, though a more careful reading of the literature suggests they really spanned the winter and sometimes stretched into spring. According to Kit Stolz, they’re …
More than halfway through our winter precipitation season, the snowpack is pathetic and the runoff forecasts dismal. (courtesy Western Regional Climate Center) Tania Soussan has more in this morning’s Journal (sub. req.): Several places set new record lows for snowpack as of Feb. 1. The forecast calls for spring river flows to be 27 percent …