When Zach Sharp sent me a copy of his paper in yesterday’s Science Express, I only had to get to the words “moon rocks” to decide to do a story. I mean, they’re moon rocks. Zach, a stable isotope geochemist, is a bit of a mad scientist. So even without moon rocks, his work is …
David Appell, the science journalist whose work more than anyone else’s got me thinking hard about the implications of climate change and its relationship to my journalism, spewed some frustration last week that resonated. It doesn’t quoteblock well, go read the whole thing, but in a nutshell he argues that there’s not much point for …
Continue reading ‘Why David Appell Might Quit Reporting on Climate’ »
update: Eli had a nice post on this topic last week. In the newspaper this week, I took a whack at what I think is one of the fundamental public misunderstandings about the nature of science. I like to call it “the textbook problem”, but one might also characterize it as “the science journalism problem.” …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Problem With Science Journalism’ »
From this weekend’s newspaper (sub/ad req), a piece about UNM’s Museum of Southwestern Biology taking responsibility for the remarkable early twentieth century plant collection of Brother Gerfroy Arsène Brouard: A Smithsonian scientist eight decades ago joked that the mosses and lichens of northern New Mexico were sure to suffer before the determined onslaught of Brother …
Some days you have to write about nuclear waste. Some days you have to write about water contamination in the Rio Grande. And some days you simply can’t avoid writing about shooting lasers at the moon (sub/ad req): Scientists using a NASA satellite and a New Mexico telescope have found a missing Soviet spacecraft on …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Lasers on the Moon’ »
If you follow nuclear weapons policy, the last thing you need at this point is another analysis of yesterday’s Nuclear Posture Review rollout. But I did have something to say in this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req) that represents what I think is an important and underappreciated piece of the debate. Here in New Mexico, home …
Continue reading ‘Nuclear Posture Review, a Bottom-Up Perspective’ »
A friend called me out on this morning’s column, a piece about Cathy Plesko, a Los Alamos scientist working on the asteroid mitigation problem (sub/ad req). He said he’d gotten all the way to the end before he realized it was really a column about global warming. Kaching! Back in the ’90s, I wrote a …
Friday’s release of the National Academy study on pumping restrictions in the California Bay-Delta system on behalf of endangered fish offers a great case study in “scientization,” the process by which competing political factions repurpose scientific findings to meet their political needs. The panel concluded that the pumping restrictions are scientifically justified, a blow for …
Continue reading ‘Scientization: Delta Smelt, a Case Study’ »
I am happy to report that a paper I helped write, The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus, has been included in McGraw Hill Annual Editions Environment 10/11, a collection used as an undergraduate environmental and earth science reader. (Full disclosure: the series editor, Zach Sharp, is a friend.)
Matthew Nisbet, in Slate today, gives thoughtful voice to my growing frustration with the way my friends in the science community have been approaching the climate politics and policy discussion of late: The problems begin when scientists overestimate the influence of climate skeptics and their corporate backers. When legislation and international treaties fail, and polls …
Continue reading ‘Confusing metaphorical warfare with policy substance’ »